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Contents Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................... vii S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING Introduction: Transcultural Spaces ............................................................................ ix Contributors .................................................................................................................. xix I. Interventions in Ecological and Environmental Studies L AWRENCE B UELL Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? ............................................................... 3 C ATRIN G ERSDORF Nature in the Grid: American Literature, Urbanism, and Ecocriticism ................ 21 L EYLA H AFERKAMP “Somebody’s got to get angry…”: Ecoterrorism in the Work of Carl Hiaasen .................................................................................................................. 41 II. Transcultural Networks and the Media G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age .................................... 55 A LAN T RACHTENBERG Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation .................................................... 75 A LAN W ALLACH The Persistence of the Panoramic: Technologies of Vision in American Culture from the 19 th to the 21 st Century ................................................................... 89 R OLF G IESEN Metropolis, City of the Dead ....................................................................................... 109 III. Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment S TEFAN L. B RANDT Open City, Closed Space: Metropolitan Aesthetics in American Literature from Brown to DeLillo ................................................................................................. 121 G EORG D RENNIG Cities of Desire: Ecotopia and the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary ....................... 145 Contents vi S ONJA G EORGI Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl ................................................................................................................... 159 J EAN K EMPF The American Small Town and the Reconstruction of Space ................................ 173 IV. Transformations in the Perception of the Environment F RANK M EHRING Tourism of Doom: In Search of Hemingway’s “Snow” on Kilimanjaro in the New Millennium .................................................................................................... 191 R ALPH J. P OOLE Bastardized History: Elif Shafak’s Transcultural Poetics ........................................ 213 A STRID M. F ELLNER ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and the Challenges of Urbanity .................................................................................. 231 V. Sounding Nature - Reading Nature in the Age of Environmental Crises B ERND H ERZOGENRATH A ‘Meteorology of Sound’: Composing Nature in the 20 th and 21 st Centuries ................................................................................................................. 247 M ICHAEL S AUTER “How do I get out? ” - Transcultural Places as Sanctuary in The Human Stain ............................................................................................................ 261 A LEXANDER S TARRE Wilderness Woes: Negotiating Discourse and Environment in Early American Captivity Narratives .................................................................................. 273 C HERYL L OUSLEY Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger: Cosmopolitanism in Dionne Brand’s Long Poems Thirsty and Inventory ............................................................................. 295 VI. Artists’ Forum J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba ................................................... 313 Acknowledgments The present volume has received support from a number of persons and institutions to whom we would like to express our deepest gratitude. First and foremost, we - that is, Stefan L. Brandt and Frank Mehring as organizers of the international conference “Transcultural Spaces” (30 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2008) - would like to thank Winfried Fluck, who has provided invaluable assistance to the making of this anthology as well as to the preparation of the above mentioned conference, upon which this book is based. Intellectually and organizationally, he has been a source of constant inspiration to us. We are thankful to the Freie Universität Berlin and the Graduate School of North American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute for their generous financial support. In addition, we would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Alumni Association e.V. of the Kennedy Institute for providing financial means to make the conference possible. The American Academy in Berlin has been a wonderful host as well as an inspiring place of academic dialogue, from which the “Artists’ Forum” in this volume evolved. We wish to thank all contributors for their wonderful collaboration and stimulating exchange of ideas while developing their papers into articles. We are very happy and feel honoured they travelled from various corners of the world to the Kennedy-Institute to make this event happen and now contributed to this collection of essays. We are also indebted to our research assistants Linn Friedrichs, Julian Henneberg, Janice Mitchell, and Benjamin Ulonska for their important help in the process of editing this book. Last but not least, we want to thank the general editors of REAL for including this volume in the series, and Karin Burger for accompanying the process of publication. S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING Introduction: Transcultural Spaces Fig.: Walden in Berlin. Installation by Tobias Hauser in Berlin at Potsdamer Platz. When we initiated our conference on “Transcultural Spaces” at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in October of 2008, a photo of an installation at Potsdamer Platz served as a visual opener. At the time of origin of the photo (autumn of 2002), the area east of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin was still an urban wasteland surrounded by the debris of the death strip which ran through the very heart of this once ideologically and spatially divided city. Hardly noticeable in the stark contrast between the rising postmodern corporate buildings of the Sony Center, Deutsche Bahn, and the Mercedes Benz towers (which appear locked in a newly imposed gridiron structure) and an anti-pastoral ‘wilderness,’ awaiting the footprints of urban planners and architects, emerges a small architectural installation: a one-toone replica of the cabin built by the patron saint of the environmentalist movement Henry David Thoreau in the first half of the 19 th century at a little pond one and a half mile outside of Concord Massachusetts. This astonishing building from another time and space challenges our perspective on the spaces we inhabit in many ways. Its very presence produces an alternative S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING x space which flouts familiar geographical, topographical, and chronological parameters. With its transgression of time and space, the site activates the cultural imaginary of the American patron saint of nature writing and challenges us to rethink our everyday environment in transcultural terms. At the same time it flouts our conceptions of ‘Nature’ and ‘Urbanity.’ The photo asks, in a way, whether both concepts can be conceived of as antithesis or symbiosis - a theme which Lawrence Buell conjugated in his lecture which now serves as an opener to this book. The image of Thoreau’s cabin at the unfinished site of Potsdamer Platz reminds us that modern cities represent transcultural spaces in which the confrontations of urbanity, ecology, and the environment emerge most visibly. 1 Tensions between the creative and destructive aspects of “global cities” (Saskia Sassen) reverberate throughout the humanities. In the wake of the recent politicization of the humanities and especially the ‘transnational turn’ within the discipline of American Studies, ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ have increasingly been conceptualized as hybrid entities. If, indeed, the environment can be seen as “lived space,” as Henri Lefebvre has claimed in his important study (36-46), and literature as a form of “cultural ecology,” as Hubert Zapf has recently argued, we have to ask further questions regarding the dynamic of cultural interactions in “spaces of control” and “spaces of possibilities” (Ostendorf 3). What is still missing in the current dialogue about the stakes of environmentalism is an interdisciplinary approach that ties together structural as well as experiential components developed in each discipline. The international symposium “Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment in the New Millennium” at the Kennedy Institute in Berlin provided a forum in which such questions were addressed in a synergetic manner, trespassing the traditional boundaries between literary theory, social anthropology, cultural studies, and environmental planning. How should - and how can - such an interdisciplinary approach react to the post-ecological turn of the 2000s? In this context, international scholars from seventeen different countries explored the strategies of individual groups, i.e., writers, architects, filmmakers, theorists, journalists, and ecological activists, to negotiate the threat of extreme climatic change. Special emphasis was put on the challenges provoked by recent phenomena such as Hurricane Katrina, the floodings in Europe, the climate changes at the poles, and pollution in big cities. Following Catrin Gersdorf’s and Sylvia Mayer’s call in Natur-Kultur-Text (2007) to bring about a paradigmatic change in methodological approaches to the environmental crises, our interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary volume Transcultural Spaces combines interests in literature, film, architecture, history, cultural geography, art history, ecological studies, and sociology. Rather than assembling such approaches eclectically or simply juxtaposing them, we 1 Walden in Berlin. Installation by Tobias Hauser in Berlin at Potsdamer Platz. Photo by F. Mehring © 2002. Introduction: Transcultural Spaces xi want to bridge the gap between different scholarly perspectives, highlighting differences as well as excavating shared methods and insights, which will push the respective disciplines forward. Transcultural Spaces aspires to investigate both the appearances of ‘city’ and ‘nature’ as opposites in corporate cultural hegemony and the modes of amalgamation and hybridization by which city and nature are constituted as complementary figures. What contributions have literary and cinematic fiction, the visual arts, and other discourses in Germany, Eastern Europa, China, or the United States made to a dialogue on environmental and technological issues? How are we, as international scholars of American Studies, to deal with the challenges of the ongoing environmental crisis, which, by all means, is also a crisis of technological progress? While discussing the complex interrelationship of city and nature in American literature and culture, we also wanted to engage with the theme of ‘transcultural spaces’ on a performative level in the “artists’ forum.” This crucial slot in our conference schedule created an open-minded and open-ended venue to rethink the boundaries between theory and practice and arrive at a moment of dynamic conflation of artistic imagination and academic thought. The book features five sections which address interventions in ecological and environmental studies, analyze transcultural networks and the functions of different media, explore the links between urbanity, ecology, and the environment, trace transformations in the perception of the environment and offer alternative ways to perceive sights and sounds of Nature in the age of environmental crises. An additional section is dedicated to approaching the theme of transcultural spaces from an artistic perspective. To back this aim, we invited an American photographer and a German pianist to contribute to the anthology. In his essay “Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? ” Lawrence Buell addresses the challenges of how to conceive of and respond to the growing development of urbanization from an ecological and environmental standpoint. He calls for an intervention of urban ecological or environmental thinkers in order to explore the potential of conceptual, ethical and aesthetic approaches to environmental challenges. Understanding cities as transcultural spaces both biologically as well as culturally, Buell discusses en detail the pros and cons of six metaphorical encapsulations in an ecological discourse. They include city/ nature as binary; city as holistic macro-organism; city as fragmentary assemblage; as palimpsest; as network; and as apocalypse. In search of a viable urban ecological order, Buell is interested in exposing the “dependence of urban thought and experience vis-à-vis ecological matters upon embedded, often unacknowledged, tropes that function not only as conduits for verbal expression but also often constitute the conceptual structures in terms of which environmental strategies get thought through” (18). The subsequent essay by Catrin Gersdorf, entitled “Nature in the Grid: American Literature, Urbanism, and Ecocriticism,” focuses on gridiron pat- S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING xii terns as a starting point to redescribe urban spatiality and reconceptualize the relationship between nature and culture. On the one hand, the grid boasts a reputation of being the most rational and democratic form in the production of space. On the other hand, the concept of the city is often rejected in the American cultural imaginary despite the fact that most of the nation’s urban centers are built upon a grid pattern. Gersdorf challenges literary scholars to write a “critique of what Henri Lefebvre has described as the mental production of space in general, and of urban space in particular” (23). In a three-part structure, Gersdorf traces the place and function of the city in American literary culture, offers a close reading of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz as an example of how to approach literature as a narrative production of urban space, and positions the text within the discursive context of a new urbanism. Her analysis of Jazz sets out to show if and how the invasion of nature into the city grid can be narrated as a non-destructive process. Thereby, ecocritical consciousness could be freed from formulas that often rely on apocalyptic rhetoric or antiurban sentiments. In her essay, “Somebody’s got to get angry…,” Leyla Haferkamp discusses the American journalist Carl Hiaasen’s dark, satirical, and ‘politically incorrect’ novels about environmental politics in his native Florida, written in the pre-9/ 11 idyll of the ‘mellow eighties.’ Haferkamp’s essay focuses on the most controversial figure in Hiaasen’s eco-thrillers, Clinton Tyree aka Skink, an idealistic ex-governor turned ‘wild’ hermit engaging in acts of outright ecoterrorism, which can be traced back to the American strand of ‘ecotage philosophy’ as propagated in Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and enacted in ‘real life’ by radical organizations such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Skink, who Hiaasen has called his “moral compass,” embodies, like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, the ‘transcultural interzone’ between urbanity and ‘pristine nature.’ His mode of ‘civil disobedience,’ however, differs from that of Thoreau in that it is, much like that of the Unabomber, an explosive blend of intricate strategy and unbridled violence. Haferkamp’s essay asks whether Hiaasen’s propagation of ecoterrorism is a viable means of postmodern protest against the relentless commodification of the American landscape. The next section in the book, “Transcultural Networks and the Media” begins with Gundolf S. Freyermuth’s article “Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age.” In his essay, Freyermuth explains that the history of culture and urbanity represents largely a history of networks. From a broad historical perspective, Freyermuth confronts the question of how contemporary networks of transportation and communication shaped, changed, and informed both the experience of urban city life and the arts. While he recognizes a continuation of technological and cultural developments from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment into our digital age, he nevertheless makes it clear that the implementation of digital networking technologies is Introduction: Transcultural Spaces xiii bringing about radical changes in urban life, namely its virtual empowerment and augmentation. In “Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation,” Alan Trachtenberg takes a critical look at the visual forms of self-stylization of globally active corporations, including office interiors, cubicles, iconographic branding, and architectural designs. Based on the assumption that images are multivalent, polysemous, and ambiguous, Trachtenberg uncovers a paradoxical function of visual domains of corporations which offers a chance to escape manipulative efforts behind brand equity and idealized corporate images. By reading images of transcultural spaces in the corporate world against the grain, they reveal insights about a company undercutting the very message originally intended to convey. These counter-images, he argues, can serve as a potential weapon since it brings to the forefront what is “concealed in plain view on the surface.” In his article “The Persistence of the Panoramic: Technologies of Vision in American Culture from the 19th to the 21st Century,” Alan Wallach turns to the commonplace landscape experience of panoramic vistas in order to explore the complex relation between viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle. Based on the argument that landscape might be seen as a form of ideology, Wallach follows various examples of a totalizing vision during the last two centuries. Starting with large scale panoramas in late 18 th century London, Wallach goes on to examine the vistas enshrined by the artists of the Hudson River School in the United States and arrives at the worldwide perception of Hollywood spectacles in CinemaScope and the IMAX experience. With the advent of global access to satellite photography on the Internet, Wallach argues that the thrill of the panoptic sublime continues a mode of reception that reinforces the viewer to identify with a dominant power. Rolf Giesen investigates the historical traces in the media of (trick) photography and film in order to address the evolution of synthetic actors and the creation of artificial spaces, thereby creating a nexus between artistic innovations in Germany, the United States, and China. In his article, “Metropolis, City of the Dead,” Giesen uses the stop-motion animation of German expressionist film artists as a starting point to ask far-reaching questions about representations in synthetic societies, artificial intelligence, and international challenges in a not too distant future, in which the ideal interface between human and digital environments will have been achieved. Stefan L. Brandt’s essay “Open City, Closed Space: Metropolitan Aesthetics in American Literature from Brown to DeLillo” uses the notion of openness as built fabric from the work of urban theorist Richard Sennett to put forward an argument regarding the chiastic patterns of urban experience. As Brandt contends, negotiations of city life in U.S. literature have always been marked by a double structure: The modern ideal of the ‘Open City’ simultaneously restricts the new opportunities it suggests through elements of textual closure. On the other side, the image of the ‘city as labyrinth’ may induce patterns of openness by inviting readers to transform existing boundaries and explore S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING xiv the potentially liberating character of urbanity. As Brandt demonstrates in his readings of works by Brown, Poe, Whitman, and Dos Passos, the concept of the ‘Open City’ lends itself to a vision of fluctuation which inevitably results in a process of shrinking. In post-9/ 11 literature (DeLillo, Auster, Foer), the ‘shrinking city’ is symbolically expanded through what Brandt, borrowing a phrase by Bakhtin, calls urban fiction’s “chronotopic imagination,” namely, its tendency to overcome the traumatic events of 9/ 11 by inventing ‘temporal spaces’ that help the protagonists find a refuge from their state of anomie. Georg Drennig’s article “Cities of Desire: Ecotopia and the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary” examines the tactics and strategies of constructing an alternative urbanity in Ernst Callenbach’s Ecotopia, applying these insights to a reading of urban spaces in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. According to Drennig, the urban model suggested in Callenbach’s utopian novel challenges hegemonic notions of order by dissolving the equation of wilderness with anarchy and by renegotiating the concept of urbanity as an ordered space. The essay scrutinizes the strategies of planners and politicians and the tactics of local movements from the perspective of Callenbach’s vision of a counter-hegemonic landscape. A main focus in the final part of his essay is placed upon what Drennig calls “the tactical Cascadia, the daily - or extraordinary - practices that re-make or challenge strategic space and its discourses” (156). The essay by Sonja Georgi, “Ethnic Space and the Commodofication of Urbanity,” looks at the intersection of urban space and ethnicity in the novel Salt Fish Girl by Chinese-Canadian writer Larissa Lai. In the novel, Georgi argues, poverty, violence, and ecological disasters have contaminated both society and nature, rendering the North American suburb into a companyowned compound. In line with urban dystopias of the 1990s (e.g., Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It), Lai’s Salt Fish Girl projects current trends of the privatization of public space into the near future and shows how collective cultural histories and individual agencies are re-appropriated by marginalized subjects. Tying in with Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg as a “disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 163), Georgi’s essay seeks to examine how Lai discusses a future in which ethnic bodies have become commodities, tracing how marginalized subjects reclaim agency in this dystopian space. Jean Kempf, in his article “The American Small Town and the Reconstruction of Space,” holds that the concept of the ‘small town’ was developed in the post-Civil-War era as a marker of community and national becoming. Unlike ‘international’ images such as the ‘American Dream,’ the ‘small town’ remained “a purely domestic object, one very little shared by the rest of the world” (176). Within this imagery, ‘America’ could be constructed as a mental, emotional, and memorial space, through which ‘American-ness’ was constituted and communicated. In Kempf’s reading, the fictional ‘small town’ - to be found in countless works of American literature, film, photography Introduction: Transcultural Spaces xv and painting - is not more than a “fantastic fallacy” (188), a hybrid space in which reality and fiction are symbolically entwined. Frank Mehring, in his opening essay for the fourth section of the book, “Transformations in the Perception of the Environment,” combines Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatic model with theories of ecocriticism in order to reassess the African encounters in the oeuvre of Ernest Hemingway. Following Winfried Fluck’s assumption that “physical space has to become mental space or more precisely, imaginary space” (25), Mehring reads authorial silences to uncover “cultural (in)difference” and asks about ethical repercussions. In his essay “Tourism of Doom: In Search of Hemingway’s ‘Snow’ on Kilimanjaro in the New Millennium,” Mehring argues that many of Hemingway’s protagonists are incurious and inattentive to the environment they have sought to find refuge in. Mehring’s close reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” reveals that the protagonist Harry represents an unredeemable city dweller by deconstructing his stated goal of finding salvation in Africa. Mehring suggests a re-contextualization of Hemingway’s concept of ‘whiteness’ in the metaphysical Masai term ‘Ngàje Ngài’ (House of God) in order to concentrate on its function in a changed discourse on African safaris and the trekking industry at Mount Kilimanjaro in the New Millennium. Ralph J. Poole’s essay “Bastardized History” discusses Elif Shafak’s English-language novels The Saint of Incipient Insanities and The Bastard of Istanbul as postcolonial and global narratives dealing with questions of ethnicity and nationality. At once satiric post-9/ 11 migration stories and humorous transcultural love tales, Shafak’s novels address highly charged issues like the interlacing of the personal and the political in the age of globalization. Poole argues that these novels, even though coming across as at times humorous tales of migration, ultimately create rather disturbing and pessimistic vistas on the state of art of transculturation. In Shafak’s writings, urban America - as a multicultural and potentially inhospitable ‘New World’ - serves as backdrop for addressing the topic of the futility of finding a home within an increasingly alienated world. Instead of a globalized understanding of ethnic diversity, Poole claims, the novels precariously negotiate the limited and transitional space of transculturation. Astrid M. Fellner addresses the issue of transcultural poetics with respect to the work of Afro-Caribbean Canadian poet Dionne Brand. Fellner’s essay, “Translating Toronto on a Bicycle,” analyzes Brand’s works What We All Long For and Thirsty as documents of transcultural exchange which capture boundary crossings on different levels: national, cultural, ethnic/ racial, and sexual. In Brand’s works, Toronto becomes a space of cultural translation where the protagonists translate the city’s cultural and spatial divisions by creating points of contact. Carla, one of the protagonists in What We All Long For, tries to make sense of the totality of the city and longs for a coherent sense of self by exploring different areas of the city on her bicycle, thereby connecting both the different parts of her fractured identity as well as the different fragments of the city. As Fellner shows in her essay, the bicycle here S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING xvi functions as a vehicle which cuts across multiple ‘borderlines,’ exposing the city’s fragments as areas of discontinuity. Bernd Herzogenrath’s article commences the fifth section of the book, “Sounding Nature - Reading Nature in the Age of Environmental Crises.” Entitled “A ‘Meteorology of Sound: ’ Composing Nature in the 20 th and 21 st Centuries,” Herzogenrath’s essay investigates the connection between nature, weather, and music in contemporary American culture, paying special attention to the shift from representing subjective effects of weather phenomena in 18 th and 19 th century music to modes of reproduction of the process and dynamic of weather employed by avant-garde composers of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. For his transcultural and transmedial approaches, he draws on the wide-ranging oeuvres of Charles Ives, John Cage, and John Luther Adams. Taking his cues from observations by Henry David Thoreau, Herzogenrath reconnects Adams’s insistence that nature has no need to be translated or represented with what could ultimately be described as an ecology of music heard and communicated by Thoreau one and a half centuries before. Michael Sauter’s piece “How do I get out? ” targets the construction of transcultural places as sanctuary in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. Utilizing Hubert Zapf’s theory of “Literature as Cultural Ecology” as a methodological approach, Sauter looks at the role of literature as cultural-critical metadiscourse, imaginative counterdiscourse, and reintegrative interdiscourse. His analysis of Roth’s The Human Stain focuses on the two geographical settings of the novel, New York City and its suburbs as well as the area around Athena College and Nathan Zuckerman’s rural Berkshire retreat. The essay shows that the interrelationship between inner city, suburb and countryside structures the novel, contributing to a complex social dynamics which can be tied back to the cultural tensions existing between these different locations. In “Wilderness Woes: Negotiating Discourse and Environment in Early American Captivity Narratives,” Alexander Starre demonstrates that historical visions of American nature have often been intricately tied to the concept of ‘wilderness.’ This concept, Starre claims, has been imported from biblical discourse by the Puritan settlers of New England. In the forced encounter of English captives with the New England environment during the Indian wars at the turn of the 18 th century, the imagined ‘wilderness’ of Puritan discourse is brought, in analogy to a phrase by Thomas Paine, “to the touchstone of nature” (276). With the immensely popular genre of the captivity narrative, the early development of a specifically American concept of nature becomes more and more visible. While reflecting on recent ecocritical work, Starre’s essay sheds light on the spatial and ecological constructions of captivity narrative authors such as Mary Rowlandson, John Williams, and John Gyles. Cheryl Lousley, in her article “Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger: Cosmopolitanism in Dionne Brand’s Long Poems Thirsty and Inventory,” argues that a main reason for the prominence of urbanity in debates about globalization Introduction: Transcultural Spaces xvii lies in the emergence of economically powerful and racially and culturally diverse ‘global cities.’ The global city is seen as either threatening to undermine the nation-state and its cultural, civic, and welfare protections, or announcing the beginning of a virtuous cosmopolitanism which might supersede nationalist exclusions. Concentrating on the figure of the ‘stranger’ in Brand’s writings (also a key figure in theories of cosmopolitanism), the essay discusses questions of political and ethical consideration as well as grief in the long poems Thirsty and Inventory - issues which seem to culminate in a cosmopolitan response to global environmental destruction. The final section of the book, entitled “Artists’ Forum,” offers an alternative approach to mapping, describing, and understanding spaces as (trans)cultural constructs. The collaboration between German pianist Jens Barnieck and American writer/ photographer Wheeler Sparks traces the life of Jewish German émigré poet, pedagogue and professor of the classics Vera Lachmann. Having escaped the Nazi terror regime in 1939 she, after an odyssey of job search, eventually secured a professorship at Brooklyn College in New York City. In 1944, Lachmann established a summer camp for boys in North Carolina, which existed for almost twenty years. This now forgotten site in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains influenced a generation of American boys born to Jewish German emigrants. The transatlantic theme led Barnieck and Sparks to visit and write about the former Camp Catawba. In a lyrical way, the account describes their journey to the camp, evoking its transcultural spirit, tracing its innovative pedagogical approach, and revealing its enduring artistic impact. Through impressionistic images and diligent research, including the unearthing of neglected musical scores composed at the camp, the two artists represent a vivid example of how a site can be experienced, translated, and creatively communicated as a transcultural space. Our theoretical approach to transcultural spaces follows an understanding of American Studies which Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez recently defined as a “joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present-day meaning and significance of the United States” (ix). At the same time, we recognize that the challenges of urbanity, ecology, and the environment require us to go beyond the concept of the ‘nation state’ in order to understand the global dimensions of this nexus. With this volume we hope to contribute to the ongoing debates on the transculturality of ‘space’ which emerged after the ‘transnational turn’ as well as to a discourse that, as we believe, could be the starting point for an ‘ecological turn.’ Berlin, Laguna Beach & Siegen, July 2010 S TEFAN L. B RANDT , W INFRIED F LUCK , F RANK M EHRING xviii Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1995. Claviez, Thomas, and Winfried Fluck, eds. Theories of American Culture - Theories of American Studies. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. Fluck, Winfried. “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” Space in America. Theory - History - Culture. Eds. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005. 25-40. Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Natur, Kultur, Text: Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Ostendorf, Berndt, ed. Transnationalism: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere. Carl Winter: Heidelberg, 2002. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. “The Public Realm.” The Blackwell City Reader. Eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 261-72. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies.” Literature and Ecology. Special issue of Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 124.1 (2006): 1-10. ---. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. Contributors B ARNIECK , J ENS . Pianist. Bornpfad 18a. 65232 Taunusstein, Germany. B RANDT , S TEFAN . Department of English and American Studies, Universität Siegen, Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2, FB 3, 57068 Siegen, Germany. B UELL , L AWRENCE . Department of English, Harvard University, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. D RENNIG , G EORG . Department of English, Universität Wien, Spitalgasse 2-4, 1090 Wien, Austria. F ELLNER , A STRID . Chair of North American Literatures and Cultures. Department of British, North American and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Saarland University, Campus C 5.3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. F REYERMUTH , G UNDOLF S. ifs internationale filmschule köln. Werderstraße 1, 50672 Köln, Germany. G EORGI , S ONJA . Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg- Universität Mainz, Staudinger Weg 9, 55128 Mainz, Germany. G ERSDORF , C ATRIN . John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany. G IESEN , R OLF . Riemeisterstr. 164, 14169 Berlin, Germany. Visiting Professor, Animation School, Communication University of China, Beijing. Guest Professor, Jilin Animation Institute, Changchun, China. H AFERKAMP , L EYLA . Englisches Seminar I, Universität zu Köln, Albertus- Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. H ERZOGENRATH , B ERND . Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe- Universität Frankfurt, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. K EMPF , J EAN . Université Lumière-Lyon 2 / UMR Triangle 5206, 86 rue Pasteur, F-69007 Lyon, France. C ONTRIBUTORS xx L OUSLEY , C HERYL . Rachel Carson Center, LMU-Munich, Leopoldstr. 11a, 80802 Munich, Germany. M EHRING , F RANK . Department of Cultural Studies. John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany. P OOLE , R ALPH J. Department of English and American Studies, Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Akademiestr. 24, 5020 Salzburg, Austria. S AUTER , M ICHAEL . Fachbereich Anglistik/ Amerikanistik. Universität Augsburg , Universitätsstr. 10, 86135 Augsburg, Germany. S PARKS , W HEELER . Writer & Photographer. 9849 Elmcrest, Dallas, TX 75238 USA. S TARRE , A LEXANDER . Seminar für Englische Philologie, Georg-August- Universität Göttingen, Käte-Hamburger-Weg 3, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. T RACHTENBERG , A LAN . Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, Yale University, 149 Elm Street, New Haven, CT., 06520, USA. W ALLACH , A LAN . American Studies Program, The College of William and Mary, PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795 USA. I. Interventions in Ecological and Environmental Studies L AWRENCE B UELL Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? During the lifetime of even my youngest reader, the percentage of earth’s population living in metropolitan areas has increased dramatically. It now exceeds fifty percent, and it is growing fast. With this has come a broad range of equally dramatic though often less immediately perceptible environmental impacts: to climate, public health, planetary biodiversity, and natural systems in general. The task of merely conceiving the phenomenon of worldwide urban growth from an ecological or environmental standpoint, let alone deciding how to respond to it at either individual or collective levels, boggles the mind. I admit to finding myself especially challenged as one who - like many of the professional and managerial classes in the developed world - prefers to live on the urban fringe rather than within the city proper. As a commuter from suburbia, I contribute to urban financial well-being but also to urban ecological stress, despite small-scale economies of recycling, residential energy consumption, shopping with an eye for locally-produced food, and driving a small hybrid car. But almost no matter where or how one lives, if one both depends on cities and desires their ecological betterment, one does well to start from a sense of conscienceful awareness of contributing to the problems one would address, given how much larger than every urban region is its ‘ecological footprint’ - that is, the area required to provide the resources the city consumes. Conscienceful awareness is all the more important when one stands to profit from one’s discourse. As Rüdiger Wittig of the Institute of Botany at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main sarcastically remarks of green urban planning, “‘Nature in cities’ is lucrative business. Many jobs depend on it, a lot of money is involved, and […] competition often leads to exaggerated promises.” So it behooves researchers to explore with great care “the question of whether, in which cases, and to what degree, the integration of nature into urban development is reality or fiction” (593). Of course we humanists are not his main targets. By contrast to urban planners and architects, our interventions as urban ecological or environmental thinkers are quite low-stakes in a financial sense. Yet they may be no less potentially significant on that account conceptually, ethically, and aesthetically. My own intervention here will be to identify and assess the pros and cons, ecologically speaking, of six common metaphorical encapsulations - not pretending that these exhaust the list of possibilities - to which both fictive and critical discourse resort for encapsulating the relation between built and natural elements in urban sites. Sometimes these are deployed self- L AWRENCE B UELL 4 consciously, as in a number of the examples from literature and the arts cited below. But no less often they circulate unreflectingly, indeed unconsciously, constituting the very structures in terms of which thought, expression, and even policy gets patterned - namely these: city/ nature as binary; city as holistic macro-organism; city as fragmentary assemblage; as palimpsest (i.e., as stratification of layers over time); as network; and as apocalypse. Except for the last, I shall discuss them in what seems roughly an ascending order of conceptual reach. Each, I argue, has its characteristic benefits and hazards. Admittedly, seriatim treatment of them as if they were discrete categories is potentially misleading, since these schemas are often deployed in combination, but I hope that the reductionism will seem a reasonable price to pay for clarity of focus. Before getting underway, I want to start with two further preliminary generalizations. First, having to do with the place of nature in cities, of nonhuman forms of life specifically. Although from a global-biocentric standpoint metropolitan growth has clearly been harmful and distorting for nature, at the same time - in ways this big picture tends to screen out - it can also be seen as potentially enriching. On the one hand, cities manifestly compromise ecosystems and extinguish species. No urban riverway can match the biodiversity of areas more pristine; and the plant and other marine life that survives in polluted waterways is more vulnerable to disease and malformation. On the other hand, just as cities promote diversity of human population and cultural style, so too, they function as “concentration points” and “distribution centers” for a striking array of animal, plant, and other life forms (Sukopp 2-3). In other words, cities are transcultural spaces biotically as well as culturally. Some of this influx is planned and managed, as with botanical gardens, zoos, pets, and the vegetation on so-called green roofs; some of it is accidental and also undesired, as with rats and other vermin and disease vectors; and some of it is fortuitous but also potentially enriching, including much of what urban ecologist Ingo Kowarik calls “nature of the fourth kind,” which “starts with cracks in sidewalks or in colonization of walls and buildings […] and leads to growth in abandoned areas and to impressive urban-industrial woodlands” (22). 1 Nothing is easier than to wishfully overstate such scattered instances of happenstance nature springing up in the city, as Kowarik begins to do here, or as Marie Winn does in her bestselling nonfiction narrative Red-Tails in Love (1999), about a pair of hawks that choose a Manhattan apartment building for a roost. But neither should we underestimate the combined impact of the planned and fortuitous copresence of the natural together with the built - both as a natural phenomenon (attesting to the inevitable interpenetration of the natural and the built) and as the potential satisfaction of a human need. It’s been well attested, for instance, that exposure to natural environments, or even images thereof, is 1 N.b. the first three kinds, in Ingo Kowarik’s taxomony, are 1.) primeval, 2.) managed agro-forestry, and 3.) urban parks. Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 5 helpful in alleviating stress and facilitating convalescence from illness and surgery. 2 So there is a strong prima facie case for the place of nature in the psychic and physical well-being even of confirmed urbanites. My other set of preliminary observations relates to the place of literary and other acts of urban imagination. Here a good starting point is Patricia Yeager’s summary defense of “a poetics of infrastructure” in her editorial introduction to the 2007 PMLA special issue on “Cities.“ Against Henri Lefebvre’s dismissal of represented space as “topoi removed from lived social space,” Yeager insists that “here literature has an advantage [over social theory.]” The intertwining of codes; the habit of overdetermination; the multiple mapping that accompanies condensation and displacement; the layering that comes with the use of compound plots, points of view, tonality, atmosphere, and meter; and the dense range of figurative speech: each plaited literary device gives the weird, defamiliarizing treatment of cities a space-mapping Lefebvre overlooks. (21-22) Yeager argues persuasively that the textures of literary representation defy Lefebvre’s programmatic view of material space and spatial representation as hegemonically regulated, even if this particular passage’s emphasis on fictive discourse as defamiliarizing nuanced complication doesn’t do full justice to what her essay also shows elsewhere about the immersive power of the fictive: the power to draw its readers into its imagined scenes, affectively and even sensuously, as against instilling a sense of mystified or critical distance. What’s arguably most distinctive about the delivery power of the urban (and for that matter all other socio-environmental) imaginaries of fictive discourse is the oscillation produced in those who seriously engage it between affective immersion in the fictive world’s as-ifness, its reality-effect, and the reflexive detachment inherent in the beholder’s position and reinforced by the elements of apparent resistance or opacity registered in the text. Enough by way of preliminaries. On to those six metaphors for encapsulating the place of nature in relation to cities: metaphors upon which both theory and fiction have often drawn but that in either case operate - so I believe - by a logic similar to the aesthetic credo I’ve just stated in mini-form. That is, it performs the double move in relation to the referent that Paul Ricoeur has defined with elegant simplicity in The Rule of Metaphor: by turns abstracting us away from the factical object or tenor and retrieving it with a richer heuristic plenitude (216-39 and passim). The oldest and most deeply embedded of these metaphors is the citynature binary. City as construct wrested from and standing over against nature, for better or for worse. For worse, as when romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge depicts his “gentle-hearted” friend Charles Lamb “having pined/ And hungered after Nature, many a year,/ In the great in the great City pent” (421), or when the young William Butler Yeats, ignited by hearing 2 The most influential scholar is Roger S. Ulrich; see for instance Ulrich et al (201-30). L AWRENCE B UELL 6 his father read aloud from Henry Thoreau’s Walden, vows to take off for the “Lake Isle of Inisfree,” and build himself “a small cabin,” “of clay and wattles made” and “live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Or for better, as when the aging Yeats dreams of being translated “out of nature” into the “holy city of Byzantium,” where he “shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing”(39, 191-92). Or, more complexly, for worse and yet also in a perverse sense for better, in the distant view of blighted Manchester, England, 1945, glimpsed by the fourth and last of W. G. Sebald’s emigrant protagonists in Die Ausgewanderten: From a last bluff he had a bird’s eye view of the city spread out before him, the city where he was to live ever after. Contained by hills on three sides, it lay there as if in the heart of a natural amphitheatre [above which shone] the last rays of sunlight […] Not until this illumination died […] did his eye roam, taking in the crammed and interlinked rows of houses, the textile mills and dying works, the gasometers, chemical plants and factories of every kind, as far as what he took to be the centre of the city, where all seemed one solid mass of utter blackness, bereft of any further distinguishing features [-which, however, prompts the intimation] that “I had found my destiny.” (168-69) Like Sebald’s outer narrator, the critical reader knows that such extreme country-city antitheses are false epistemologically, simplistic projections of desire - or in this case a kind of self-immolating surrender to holocaust memory not yet disclosed. Yet these antitheses also reflect a long history of actual landscape inscriptions, as ancient as the still-visible walls of Nanjing or the green zones that mark off the boundaries of certain contemporary cities like Portland, Oregon, for recreation and for maintenance of an agricultural green belt - and sometimes for memorial reasons too, as in the capital of Scotland Arthur’s Seat looms greenly above the intensely urban royal mile to the great Edinburgh castle, which in turn towers over the central district of the modern city. So the urban-nature binary isn’t false consciousness pure and simple but also has a historical basis as a longstanding arrangement of physical landscape, often if not always reinforced by an acculturated desire to keep nature both at a safe distance and within reach. As environmental historians often observe, the campaign to preserve nature intact from human encroachment began in cities, more or less in tandem with the rise of early industrial era urbanization. Protectionism depended upon the sense of a widening gap between city and nature (see Nash 96-107). The great urban parks of the nineteenth century reflect this same logic within cities: desire for green space both distinct and proximate. By no accident was America’s first great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, famous both for his urban park and for his national park designs. An inverse variant of the city versus nature binary is the city in the desert, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, which I happened to visit recently. A smallish but sprawling city of a quarter million in a desert setting, Albuquerque is a green amoeboid shape, replete with lawns and trees and parks, su- Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 7 perimposed on a plateau otherwise barren: green city versus brown nature. But this, too, expresses the desire to fashion an urban enclave distinct from the surrounding landscape. Indeed, some cities much more densely built than this, like my own, Boston, are also arranged so as to look distinctly leafy and green from the air, at least in summer, even though the surrounding landscape is much greener than in the American southwest. This “granite garden” effect (Spirn, The Granite Garden) is obviously not an unmixed good. To be sure, it may have not only aesthetic but even ecological benefits, as by mitigating pollution and the so-called urban heat island phenomenon. But in the Albuquerques of the world, binarism has grossly destabilizing effects. It giganticizes the slender natural oasis along the Rio Grande by drawing down the water table and creating huge “sacrifice zones” in the surrounding region (Short & Short 144). The increasing competition for dwindling water supplies - in which metropolis usually wins out over small town, industrialized agriculture over small farmers, and the United States over Mexico - is the biggest ecological problem facing the American southwest today. So let’s set aside the binary schema, whatever its historic legitimacy and hermeneutic advantages, as exacting too great an ecological price, and turn to the second trope of city as itself a kind of macro-organism: a holistic technoorganic entity. Urban personification also has a long literary history. Coleridge’s friend and fellow poet William Wordsworth, at dawn on Westminster Bridge, imagines London’s mighty heart beating still. Walt Whitman personifies “million-footed Manhattan.” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake mythicizes Dublin as a configuration of two primal land and river figures, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle. William Carlos Williams metaphorizes his city as Mr. Paterson, conflating it with his own persona. Such personifications have a long prehistory in urban design. Historical sociologist Richard Sennett goes so far as to argue that city “spaces [historically] take form largely from the ways people experience their own bodies.” He traces this alleged linkage from the theory of the polis in classical Athens to the fragmented multiracial metropolises of today, contending that at each stage architectural practice is inflected by predominant strategies of bodily display or concealment (Sennett 370). Urban theorist Elizabeth Grosz takes issue with this model as too purposively masculinist, contending that environment and body “produce each other” in mutually transformative ways (297). But her feminist critique only reaffirms the body-city analogy. Even more striking than these permutations of cultural theory is how often urban body holisms of one kind or another insinuate themselves into more empirical social and applied science, as when urban planners recycle the Olmstedian cliché that parks are “the lungs of the city,” or refer to “urban metabolism” or a city’s “ecological footprint” not merely as figures of speech but as quantifiable actualities. The obvious prima facie advantages of body-city personification are its appeal to a shared, collective urban identity on the one hand and on the other L AWRENCE B UELL 8 hand to an ethics of environmental well-being implicit in the assumption that metropolis should function like a healthy body. This would seem to take us closer to thinking about cities in ecological terms than binary thinking does. Not that it is without blind spots of its own. In particular, the different possible implications of urban body metaphor can easily pull apart from each other, as when architectural theorist Donatella Mazzoleni insists on defining metropolis as the “concretization of the great oneiric structures of our collective body” (285), or when the urban body is felt to be under attack by some pathology that can only be combatted by expunging its threatening human presences - “urban cleansing” (627-51), as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai sardonically calls it. In the first case, the collectivity of the perceivers’ tie to the ecosystem gets cut; in the second, implementation of a certain regime of ecosystemic health overrides the claims of human compassion and solidarity. Nonetheless urban organismal metaphor can still be defended as a heuristic via negativa, as a way of dramatizing how actual city falls short of what a city should be, or maybe once was. African American novelist John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990) provides a telling example. The novel turns on the irony of a black administration finally elected to run that majority African American city only after it has become too broken to fix. At one point the narrator performs a sardonic rerun of the Neoclassical locodescriptive prospect piece, showing the protagonist in a slightly tipsy state contemplating the city’s original geometric layout from the strategic location of the Parthenon-like art museum: He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drawing board […] The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a newborn’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping. He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of a city […]. The founders were dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm. (44-45) The kite-flying old man is presumably Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s most ambitious designer. The image of the still-born techno-organic infant dramatizes the failure of the grand design, and the pathetic quixotism of the dead founders. Wideman’s deployment of this image reveals another limitation of bodycity metaphor, however, which applies to the city-nature binary also. Both underrepresent historical process. Body-city metaphor is the more dynamic, implying circulation rather than spatial arrangement. But neither quite gets at the evolution of urban form over time. This brings me to my third metaphor, city as palimpsest: city conceived in terms of layers or stages of growth in place through time. Palimpsestic thinking can be especially helpful in calling attention to overlooked ecological interdependencies, in some cases quite Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 9 effaced by later modification: its siting along riverways or harbors, or in relation to surrounding hills and climate conditions, as well as the logic - such as it is - of the stages of urban growth. This kind of eco-historical palimpsestic consciousness was the foundation for the theory and practice of the patriarch of contemporary urban green planning in North America, Ian McHarg. McHarg based his designs on a multidimensional, eco-historical analysis of the broader urban region. To that end, he would prepare multiple maps of the city’s underlying geology, its hydrology including both groundwater and water table, soil properties, the history of its forest cover and other plantform distributions, its historical susceptibility to erosion and other modifications of land structure, the historical distribution and momentum of human settlement, and the points of special historical interest in relation to all these. The underlying principle was to ‘design with rather than against nature’ by building upon the record of human use over time in relation to the environmental context and contingencies with as few compromises as possible (McHarg). Palimpsestic thinking has been adapted in more sophisticated ways by various subsequent urban designers and design thinkers. McHarg’s younger colleague, Anne Spirn, directed a fascinating long-term Philadelphia environmental restoration project at the same time Wideman was writing Philadelphia Fire. It involved comprehensive topographical mapping of a buried urban stream that wound through a number of mostly poor districts and converting it with the aid of community activists from a mysterious nuisance which produced “mysterious” backyard and basement flooding that in turn had caused extensive building damage into neighborhood gardens and an environmental education lab for local schools (Spirn, Language). Not all such projects get results. Spirn’s was eventually halted by funding problems and administrative regime change. Even permanently successful initiatives may get compromised by competing motives ranging from parsimony to consumerism to public anxiety about letting urban nature get so bushy or unkept that it seems aesthetically repellent or poses a risk to neighborhood security (see Jorgensen et al 95-116). But shortfall from the ecological optimum at the implementation level hardly negates the mind-expanding value of the palimpsestic thinking in counteracting the bias wired into human perception for defining environmental reality in terms of what’s in front of you at the present moment. Another provocative example is the Japanese landscape designer Ryohei Ono’s response to the prospect of turning the deindustrializing areas of big Japanese cities into parklands, as a historic memorial to a more paleolithic era and as a green amenity. This kind of thing has been done with at least partial success in the U. S., the U. K., and also Germany (e.g., in the Ruhr Valley and, as we shall see momentarily, also in Berlin). Yet Ono cautions that for cities like Tokyo and Hiroshima it would require a reorientation of ecocultural values, because the industrial sites in question are bunched along the coast and to convert them into parkland would reverse the symbolic geography of Japanese cities, which traditionally L AWRENCE B UELL 10 have been oriented inland toward the mountains rather than, as he puts it, in “the unknown sea-wards direction” (227). Perhaps this overstates the case, and even if not Ono’s caveat may go unheeded. But it is refreshing to see ecocultural considerations laid explicitly on the table. And at least sometimes ecohistorical literacy together with concerted activism can get productive win-win results, as in the capital city of Canada’s midwestern province of Saskatchewan, which managed to protect its central riverway’s wetland complex by a combination of monitoring species behaviour and appeal to a preexisting “Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds” (Holland, Prach 73). Literature and other creative arts can be powerful conduits of the palimpsest mentality and of environmental memory in general. Indeed there is a subgenre of environmental nonfiction given over to tracing the interactions between natural and built environment over time. For my own home region, a leading practitioner is John Hanson Mitchell, whose Ceremonial Time (1984) follows the shaping and reshaping of his own district of a small exurban Boston town from its geologic origins through Paleolithic prehistory to the present. Mitchell’s new “natural history of Boston” does the same thing for the city proper. In principle, that makes it a book of much broader than merely local interest because Boston is one of the most repeatedly and intensively re-engineered cities in the United States - from the leveling of its topography, to the widening of its isthmus and the recontouring of its river system over centuries, to the single most expensive urban public works project in history: the underground channeling of sections of its major freeways - the ‘big dig.’ Mitchell’s narrative also suggests the limits of the palimpsest metaphor, as in the following seriocomic reflection provoked by a freeway traffic jam: Stuck as we were in the tedious […] hour-by-hour run of linear time, it may be hard to imagine, but in reality, the solid earth is as ephemeral as a cloud. Mountains once rose from the seas in the place that is now Boston and then eroded to the hills; the hills flowed into the seas and the seas became land, and someday the rock lands will melt away again like a mist, and the seas will rise and cover all. (58) This feat of mind-expansion liberates the narrator from the scene of frustration, but at a price. To think so expansively about environmental change leaves one with no standpoint for adjudicating change, except to go with the flow. A version of this same problem of appropriate time-scaling bedevils environmental restoration projects: their goals are always already problematic, because it’s impossible, given a history of continuous environmental change, to stipulate unproblematically a particular status quo ante to which to try to return the landscape (see Higgs). In the passage at hand, against the background of geologic time, the era of the city seems so minuscule as to trivialize the biggest urban problems. To extend palimpsest to its outermost limits is to disenable it from performing any practical purpose. Indeed, not just palimpsest but also the other two frames discussed so far don’t closely Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 11 enough approximate the ground-level experience of an actual urban denizen. For this, I turn to the fourth trope, city as fragmentary assemblage. By city as fragmentary assemblage I mean to refer to two disparate phenomena that relate to each other along the lines of Michel de Certeau’s bifold conceptualization of how city space gets negotiated in everyday life under the sign of the two complementary rhetorical tropes of synecdoche and asyndeton - meaning, respectively, to experience the part as the whole or to experience the whole as a discontinuous series of bits (116-17). From the one standpoint, city seems comprised of districts of neighborhoods and/ or home ranges. This is the city of urban ethnic and local color fiction: the Irish- American slum of Stephen Crane’s Maggie, the tiny, Jewish-centered niches of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep and Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, the segregated districts of black and hispanic Chicago of Richard Wright and Sandra Cisneros, and the mixed immigrant neighborhoods of Boston depicted by Mary Antin in Promised Land. Most of these texts operate from mental maps of the city as compartmentalized neighborhoods, beyond which denizens venture with a sense of tentativeness if not positive dread of the unknown. This, too, was the basis of the first major American school of so-called urban ecology, the Chicago School, which peaked between the two world wars (cf. Park). Ecology in this context chiefly meant demographic distribution: the districting of population groups, a mode of conceptualizing activity within cityspace that rested on the orthogenetic assumption that urban growth would follow a nature-like evolution toward to a state of maturity or ‘climax,’ as the first American-generated paradigm of ecological thought had held was the case for natural ecosystems. Where the issue of the nature-city relation entered more specifically into this way of conceiving cities as congeries of neighborhoods was with regard to distribution of green space. American urban park planning initially prioritized large-scale projects like New York’s Central Park; now, at the turn of the twentieth century, came a concerted effort to provide smaller-scale parks at the neighborhood level - for a similar mixture of motives including both salubrity and social control (see Cranz). That was the starting point, in the United States at least, of the view still widespread today that a “high density” of dispersed, accessible parks “with similar and diverse land-use spaces” helps optimize civic responsibility, pride, and well-being all across a city (Forman 21). The other sense of city as fragmentary assemblage, by contrast, would conceive city fragments not as discrete entities but as a series of discontinuous frames. This is the city of postmodern cultural theory - albeit with longstanding roots in the tradition of urban flanerie. As affirmation, this disposition calls us to liberate ourselves from the quest for “archetypal forms, normative values, and overriding goals” and learn to live, however uncomfortably, with “a horizontal juxtaposition of different images” (Boyer 375). As skeptical exposé, it critiques this very persuasion as a mode of consumption, the “society of the spectacle” in Guy Debord’s phrase. This second kind of city-as-fragment mentality stands opposed to the first especially in presup- L AWRENCE B UELL 12 posing a mobile, rootless, and also at least implicitly privileged-class urban experiencer rather than a neighborhood-anchored inhabitant who operates within a delimited comfort zone or home range. This presumably somewhat buffered hypothetical cosmopolitan urbanite might seem by definition more inclined to dismiss nature-city problematics and other anxieties about ecological destabilization as sentimental nostalgia. But in other respects, such a mentality might, at least sometimes, tilt a person toward urban ecological reform. Among creative writers and artists, such figures as Charles Dickens, Jacob Riis, James Joyce, W. C. Williams, John Edgar Wideman, and Frank O’Hara are at least partial cases in point. Such a mentality might, in particular, be more likely to think in transformational terms about needful urban remediation, promoting what British urban historian and planner Peter Hall calls “the new concept of adaptive reuse: the rehabilitation and recycling of […] old physical structures to new uses” (384) that contribute to beautification, prosperity, and also overall public health. Such projects certainly don’t always involve greening the area, but often they do. That’s why present-day Manchester, England, looks a lot leafier than it did in the mid-twentieth century as remembered in Sebald’s novel, whose narrator sees only a single tree in the whole city. An excellent example of postmodern adaptive re-use of the green fragment kind located within walking distance of the Free University of Berlin’s Kennedy-Institut is Südgelände Natur-Park. A sizeable patch of shrubs and trees sprung up there spontaneously in the late twentieth century along an abandoned railway on the border of the two Germanys. It is based on a juxtaposition of old industrial and new natural: showcasing the railroad (for instance) by transforming it into walkway and some of the other old technology into spectacle, and showcasing the new greenery in the dual form of a controlled landscape through which people can stroll and a more genuinely “natural” area for nurturing biodiversity. At its entrance is posted the motto “Art Is Nature’s Nearest Neighbor”; and if the park itself does not bear out this claim categorically it demonstrates its potential truth as a palpable fact. But to conceive the city-nature relation as an assemblage of fragments, even if the fragment is as huge as the lower Thames Valley restoration project, is finally a patchwork affair that takes you only so far. Something on a more comprehensive scale is needed that none of the metaphorical frames I’ve so far dealt with can supply, with the partial exception of the palimpsest. This brings me to metaphor number five, the network. Let me here gratefully acknowledge the work of a colleague who has influenced my own thinking, landscape ecologist Richard Forman, whose recent research focuses on city-nature relations both at the case-study level and on a global-comparative level. His Urban Regions (2008) makes two claims of particular significance for my account. The first is that talk about sustainable cities makes no sense unless the unit of consideration becomes the larger urban region, as determined by such indices as the contours of the drainage basin that contributes major water supplies, geographical perimeters like Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 13 mountain ranges that mark the outer natural limits of urban expansion, and exurban tourist and recreation sites within the farthest commuting distance of urban centers (Forman 116-117). In principle, then, the diameter of an urban region could easily extend to a hundred kilometers or more. Only at this scale can one hope to arrive at planning solutions that optimize coexistence of natural and human-cultural constituencies in a rapidly urbanizing world. And second, as “the fundamental backbone” for such planning, “emerald networks” are crucial. By this is meant, in the first instance, areas of relatively open space within urban regions, existing largely beyond the most densely populated areas, that for planning purposes are considered not as isolated fragments but as interconnected - or interconnectible - through corridors created by a combination of parkland, riverbanks, and the like that allow nonhuman species to breed and circulate through the region more freely than they now can, and also provide accessible green space for a maximum percentage of the human population (249). Emerald “network,” in other words, is the conscientious urban ecological planner’s counter-metaphor to the noplanning default condition of urban “sprawl.” Such at least is the model, which of course rests to some degree on earliergeneration designers from Olmsted to Geddes to McHarg. But unlike their work, Forman’s is global in scope, with a much wider array of environmental variables taken into account, its principles educed from comparative study of thirty-eight urban regions on all six inhabited continents ranging from megacities like Moscow and Beijing to such relatively smaller urban regions as Stockholm, Canberra, and Santiago (Chile). He is no utopian. He is far from presuming that his analysis will solve all the world’s ecological problems. Even while stressing the virtues of largescale planning, he grants that in the one case among the thirty-eight where the whole urban region is already a single jurisdictional unit, the ecological results have been rather disastrous - Beijing, with its immense grid of ring roads and radial roads, which is Forman’s worst-case scenario for urban roadways, ecologically speaking. He also observes that in practice “patch planning” has far more often been prioritized than “connectivity,” and that only about one-quarter of his cities show anything like a “fully-connected emerald network, with no major gaps.” Furthermore, referring back to an earlier project that helped inspire his current study, namely a commission to design an ecologically responsible plan for Barcelona, he grants that neither then nor now could he find any prior model or case study that would promise actually to sustain “the diverse natural resources and nature in the region around a major city” (39, 145, 245). All this forces one to question whether the vision of an ecologically sustainable urban region is nothing more than wishful thinking. Many social theorists would be quick to point out that the predominant application of the network metaphor in urban discourse at least since Manuel Castells’s Rise of the Network Society (1996) has been in relation to techno-economic interlinkages among urban nodes globally - not to the city-nature interdependencies L AWRENCE B UELL 14 within this or that finite urban region. In this view, as British social geographer Peter Taylor puts it (recycling Castells), “there can be no such entity as ‘the city,’ meaning a single city” standing alone. “Cities are networks,” or - more precisely - parts of a single increasingly dense and complexly interlinked global network, within which the world’s cities look like an “archipelago” of nodal points. From this urban triumphalist standpoint, comparatively exurban, nonnetworked places tend to get written off as little more than immiserated periphery - “abandoned regions,” “cleared regions,” “supply regions created by city markets,” “bypassed places,” and so forth - and questions of ecological health or sustainability at whatever scale become epiphenomenal or simply disappear from view (8, 14, 47-48). Even more striking about Taylor’s insistence on urban interlinkage than its almost utter seeming disinterest in ecological concerns is its fatalism: its like-it-or-not assurance that the global future lies in an ever-more reticulated archipelago of urban networking as against the more tentative, thoughtexperiment character of Forman’s assessment of emerald network as urbanecological solution. To put this another way, as one moves from Forman to Castells and Taylor, the network metaphor takes a distinctly apocalyptic turn. This brings me to my final metaphor, apocalypse itself. For millennia, the city has been a preferred metaphor for figuring history’s ultimate consummation, in this world or next - whether it be the image of imperial Rome or Beijing or the socalled white city that Chicago aspired to be at the turn of the twentieth century, or the anagogic prototype of that: the millennium of the Christian book of Revelation. But opposite this, the city figures no less obsessively as metaphor of dystopia: the City of Dis, the Bunyanesque City of Destruction, the late Victorian poet James Thomson’s “city of dreadful night,” Eliot’s “unreal city” in The Waste Land. Likewise, with advancing industrialization, urban metaphor becomes increasingly appropriated in the interest of imaging both the ultimately good and the ultimately horrific ecological order. Which will it be? - the “radiant city” of LeCorbusier, or some necropolis? On the one hand, Lewis Mumford, heartened by recent advances in large scale public hygiene, electrification, and the like, writes hopefully even during the depth of the Depression of the coming of the “biotechnic” city, where “the biological sciences will be freely applied to technology, and in which technology itself will be oriented toward the culture of life” (495). On the other hand, Richard Fleischer’s dystopian film of the 1970s, Soylent Green (1973), imagines a 1984like biotechnic urban order in which the foodstocks required to feed the increasingly hungry and desperate population get replenished by the secret recycling of dead bodies, the supply of which is sustained by state-sponsored encouragement of euthanasia. Like this film, recent fictive work by and large tilts toward a fatalistic interpretation of network metaphor and a dystopian rendition of the apocalypse trope. With this in mind, I have tended in recent years to conclude my Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 15 staple undergraduate “American literature and environment” course with one of two magical realist novels of the 1990s by the Japanese-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Tropic of Orange (1997). The first centers on the boom-and-bust creation of a metropolis in the Brazilian jungle built upon the vast profits of extracting a mysterious all-purpose plasticoid substance that turns out to be the metamorphosed refuge of the world’s accumulated garbage dumps, which an equally mysterious new bacteria suddenly emerges to destroy. Tropic of Orange is a Los Angeles disaster fiction built around the intertwined fates - which range from guardedly hopeful to completely grim - of a multiethnic collage of mostly displaced or diasporic characters who dramatize the status of L. A. as a nodal point of global demographic, economic, and ecological flow, including traffic in human organs - a mordant encapsulation of all three. This second book in particular dramatizes in a tone that oscillates strangely between pathos and carnivalesque ecocultural confusion, clutter, anxiety, and immiseration of urban underclasses, both economic and environmental. As such, it’s a bottoms-up mirror of the more analytical way the growing phalanx of L. A. spatial studies gurus - Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Dolores Hayden, and others - treat the spectacle of urban fragmentation and disarray. Especially since Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: or, the Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), but stretching back at least as far as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Los Angeles-watchers have been fond of taking the city as a prophetic indicator of the national urban future, if not also of the world’s future. Yet, Los Angeles, apart from New York, is the only U. S. megacity - that is, the nation’s only city with population above ten million - out of twenty-two such cities worldwide. Of these, two others are in Europe (London and Moscow), two in Japan, and the other sixteen in the developing world, including all the biggest except for Tokyo and New York. Such developing-world megacities as Mumbai and Cairo and Lagos are certain to become an increasingly large percentage of the world’s total (Benton-Short, Short 71). Already they suffer from such mammoth infrastructure problems (of water supply, sanitation, basic human services, etc.) that it might seem quixotic if not frivolous to propose that ecological sustainability ought to become a higher priority for them. Why, after all, has it become possible to think of converting the deindustrialized zones of first-world urban regions into parkland? - Largely because of the combination of industrial outsourcing to and resource extraction from the third world that’s aggrandized the concentration of first-world wealth, at least for the affluent. All this intensifies one’s sense of the eco-apocalyptic and the fatality as against the salubrity of networking metaphors in relation to the city. Yet it is precisely in such contexts that a fatalistic view of the prospects of urban ecological health most needs to be resisted. An exemplary limit case is waste disposal. It would be hard to find a more telling instance of chronic, ubiquitous ineptitude at the level of urban environmental planning. It seems L AWRENCE B UELL 16 to have been a kind of iron law of urban history that supply-line infrastructure should precede waste-disposal infrastructure. Wells get dug before cesspools; attention gets paid to securing upstream water supplies before worrying about processing sewage discharged downstream. Even in the slow-tonegative-growth environment of the developed world this remains a nagging problem; in the U. S., two-thirds of municipal solid waste ends up in landfills (see Arsova et al 22-29). In fast-growth developing-world megacities, the situation is far more dire. In Jakarta, southeast Asia’s biggest city and a typical instance, the “sewage system is still almost nonexistent,” even though plans for one were developed in the late 1970s with World Bank assistance (“The Sewage”; cf. Abhat et al). Here and in other such megacities, infant mortality, life expectancy, environmental squalor in general are commensurately disproportionate, with no end in sight to the mounting gravity of these problems. All this reinforces the imagery of developing-world megacities as environmental disaster zones. But it does not follow from this that either the inhabitants or concerned environmental activists and NGOs have passively resigned themselves. Even in burgeoning happenstance squatter settlements - the worst-case residential situation - inhabitants can develop a multitude of streetwise survival strategies, including waste picker cooperatives of one sort or another that convert waste into asset, developing as one Mexico-based urban ecologist puts it “affordable solutions that work well in a Third World context, that create jobs, that protect the environment, that promote community participation” (Medina). Whereas 90% of World Bank support for thirdworld waste disposal, this same author points out, has gone for purchase of garbage trucks and compactors quite impractical for have-nots to maintain, local low-tech methods can process higher percentages of municipal waste at much lower cost. One well-publicized initiative of the kind that showcases both the benefits and the challenges of such efforts is the NGO-supported effort since the 1980s by Cairo’s Zabbaleen, a large enclave of Coptic Christian slum dwellers, to take charge of processing the city’s trash in the absence of an effective municipal system, using donkey carts for pickup and animals - especially pigs - to consume the garbage, adding profit by recycling other waste to the extent possible, by one account an astonishing 85% of what they collect (Epstein). At peak success, the Zabbaleen were credited with processing two-thirds of the 60% of Cairo’s rubbish that was collected, twice that of the official services (“The Zabbaleen”). Meanwhile, however, the community also met stiff resistance down the line from city officials as a local eyesore, for its stone-age methods, and for offending dominant-culture cleanliness taboos. Perhaps mainly in order to give Cairo a more modern look, the authorities first tried to restrict or ban the donkey carts and outsource motorized garbage collection - a crackdown partially countered by NGO efforts to motorize the Zabbaleen. But the global swine flu epidemic has given pretext for a more drastic measure; in spring 2009, even though not a single Egyptian case had yet been reported, the government ordered extermination of the nation’s entire pig Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis? 17 population. This edict, obviously directed against the non-Muslim pigkeeping minority, may have left the Zabbaleen without recourse to maintain trash collection with hope of decent economic return, let alone efficiency (see Slackman). Whatever the long-term consequences for Cairo, however, the Mega-Cities Project, one of the Zabbaleen’s sponsoring NGOs, reports that the methods developed there have proven transferable to two other thirdworld megacities, Manila and Mumbai. 20 So at least there seems to have been a positive upshot in the form of a new transcultural ecological strategy working for the benefit of the inhabitants of some of the world’s most stressed and distressed urban regions. In conclusion, to circle back to the title of this essay, “Nature and City,” urbanism and ecological sustainability do indeed point to potentially antagonistic interests and force-fields that threaten now, more than at any former time, to become disjunct, the former threatening to overwhelm the other. But that hardly delegitimates the desire, including and indeed especially on the part of the immiserated, to strive against what admittedly sometimes feels like doomsday so far as the prospect of a viable urban ecological order is concerned. Whether or not this turns out to be a losing battle, clearly it must be fought. What’s more, precisely because the sources of contention to such an extent have to do with qualities as well as quantities, with value commitments even more fundamentally than with strategies of implementation, this is a struggle in which artists and humanists should intervene as thinkers if not also as social activists rather than leave the job only to card-carrying planners, managers, lawyers, and engineers. Surely there are many possible kinds of intervention that do not require freezing critics and creatives into roles they are not equipped to perform. One such path, the one chosen here, is to expose the dependence of urban thought and experience vis-à-vis ecological matters upon embedded, often unacknowledged, tropes that function not only as conduits for verbal expression but also often constitute the conceptual structures in terms of which environmental strategies get thought through, for better and for worse. No environmental initiative today can hope to succeed without understanding the potential uses and abuses of metaphors like ‘ecological footprint,’ ‘sustainable development,’ ‘urban network,’ and for that matter ‘apocalypse,’ with its capacity both to rivet charismatically and to induce a state of paralysis and/ or blindness to what is actually happening on the ground. Although nothing may seem more repellent to artists and cultural critics than to see themselves on a continuum with the likes of advertisers and public relations specialists, the fact is that we too stand or fall according to our adroitness in parsing, practicing, and shaping the discourses of mediation. This is a domain that self-evidently looms ever larger with the exponential growth of the twenty-first century information economy, and the sooner environmental humanists who would also be change agents recognize this 20 See <http: / / www.megacitiesproject.org> (accessed 20 July 2010). L AWRENCE B UELL 18 and place ourselves self-consciously within it the sooner we are likely to be able to play a positive role in contributing to - for example - the urban ecological amelioration upon which our lives and well-being, in the most baldly literal sense of the word, increasingly depend. 21 21 For valuable reflections on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to Richard Forman and James Engell; to Frank Mehring and other colleagues of the Kennedy Institute’s Transcultural Spaces conference for their responses on that occasion (October-November 2008); and to Susan Suleiman, Svetlana Boym, Karen Thornber, Thomas Havens, Biodun Jeyifo, and other members of the Harvard Humanities Center’s Seminar on Urbanism, during a spring 2009 next-stage presentation. For valuable research assistance, I also thank Jamie Jones, Margaret Doherty, and Kimberly August. 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The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. New York: Basic, 1984. ---. The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Sukopp, Herbert. “Urban Ecology - Scientific and Practical Aspects.” Urban Ecology. Eds. J. Breuste, H. Feldmann, O. Uhlmann. Berlin: Springer, 1998. 3-16. Taylor, Peter J. World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge, 2004. Ulrich, Roger S., et al. “Stress Recovery During Exposure to Natural and Urban Environments.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 11 (1991): 201-30. Wideman, John Edgar. Philadelphia Fire. New York: Vintage, 1990. Wittig, Rüdiger. “Urban Development and the Integration of Nature? Reality or Fiction? ” Urban Ecology. Eds. J. Breuste, H. Feldmann, O. Uhlmann. Berlin: Springer, 1998. 593-99. Yeager, Patricia. “Introduction: Dreaming of Infrastructure.” PMLA 122 (Jan. 2007): 21- 22. Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1960. “The Zabbaleen - Cairo’s Rubbish Collectors.” BBC (20 June 2007): 5 Apr. 2010 <http: / / www.bbc.co.uk/ dna/ h2g2/ A23780270>. C ATRIN G ERSDORF Nature in the Grid: American Literature, Urbanism, and Ecocriticism The relationship between nature and culture has been imagined in many different ways and by taking recourse to numerous images and metaphors. View of Savannah, as it stood the 29th March, A.D. 1734 (Fig. 1), a document that asserted the presence of British colonial settlements on the North American continent, represents a tradition in which nature and culture are depicted as mutually exclusive and ultimately irreconcilable spaces. Fig. 1: View of Savannah, as it stood the 29th March, A.D. 1734. 20 June 2010 <www.mapcruzin. com/ free-state-maps/ free-georgia-maps.htm>. The neatly organized and bright space of colonial Savannah is surrounded by the seemingly impenetrable, darker space of the forest on three sides of its rectangular shape, and the river on the fourth side. This bird’s eye view simultaneously performs the representational functions of a map, outlining the C ATRIN G ERSDORF 22 spatial coordinates and the location of a town, and the semiotic function of a landscape engraving, in which the geometry of the grid heralds a brighter, cleaner future, one that lies at the end of a central line (perhaps the prototype of Main Street) cutting into the unorganized forest. In its depiction of urban spatiality - the gridiron pattern of the town’s streets; the town’s prospective eradication of wild nature - View of Savannah epitomizes modern cognitive habits that see nature and the urban grid as diametrically opposed phenomena: where there is one, there cannot be the other. For most of the modern age (which began with the Renaissance) the epistemological difference between nature and culture found its spatial expression in the dichotomy between wilderness and (urban) civilization. First and foremost a space of social, political, and economic organization, the city has also become a symbol for culture’s power over nature. Over the past two decades, a movement known as new urbanism has taken root in American culture. It started when a growing number of planners, developers, architects, public officials, and community activists realized that “disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage [was] one interrelated community-building challenge.” This statement, quoted from the opening paragraph of The Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU 1 ) foundational text, the “Charter of the New Urbanism” (1993), indicates a shift away from traditional perceptions of urbanity as liberation from nature towards the city’s recognition as a spatial hybrid emerging from the interaction between nature and culture. Primarily a social and political movement that seeks to shape the face of the twenty-first century American city, new urbanism may also serve as a fitting label for a number of historical, geographical, and literary narratives that reconstruct the city from a decidedly environmental perspective. The appearance of this new mode of response to the city coincides with the emergence of ecocriticism as a new methodological approach to the study of literature and culture from an ecological perspective whose practitioners seek to reveal the moral and political implications of the current environmental crisis. Far from being a critical movement with a well-defined, homogenous methodology, ecocriticism has nevertheless gained in institutional stature, with regular international conferences, professional organizations, and an ever-growing number of peer-reviewed publications. By setting the spotlight on urbanity, the two editors of this cur- 1 On its website, the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) describes itself as “the leading organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl.” See <http: / / www.cnu.org/ charter> (accessed 28 June 2010). The four principles of urban renewal in present-day America are listed as “the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of [the United States’] built legacy” (“Charter,” emphasis added). Nature in the Grid 23 rent volume draw attention to an area of critical inquiry that had been underexposed during the inceptive years of the ecocritical movement, a condition that began to change with the publication of The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, a collection of essays edited by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague in 1999. 2 Up to that point, most of the ecocritical work done in the context of American culture was an effort to promote the genre of nature writing as a tool for raising the public’s environmental consciousness. Modern nature writing, in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson, was understood as the kind of literature that most effectively reshapes perceptions of the natural world and of the place of humans in it. Yet as Andrew Ross pointed out in an interview with Michael Bennett, “the literature of conservation - almost wholly devoted to nature worship in the ‘cathedral of pines’ - is persistent in its demonization of the city” (16). In other words, on the heels of raising ecological consciousness comes the allegation that the space inhabited by the majority of the human population is “sick, monstrous, blighted, ecocidal, lifedenying, parasitical” (ibid.). With this essay I want to support the argument that an ecocritical pedagogy must not be restricted to the genre of nature writing, the era of Romanticism, or the tropes of wilderness or apocalypse. In order to advance one of ecocriticism’s core concerns - the reconceptualization of the relationship between nature and culture - literary scholars need to write a critique of what Henri Lefebvre has described as the mental production of space in general, and of urban space in particular. In The Production of Space (1974; Eng. trans. 1991), Lefebvre famously argued that in order for us to understand the impact of space on the formation of modern cultural and individual identities, we must “discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’” that are otherwise “apprehended separately” (11): The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical - nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias. (11-12) Lefebvre’s call for a unitary approach to spatial theory, as expressed in this passage, explicitly includes the imagination as a space-creating force. But he remains skeptical towards philosophy (the domain of the conceptual, metaphysical imagination) and literature (the domain of symbolic, narrative, utopian, and mythological forms of the imagination) as points of departure for developing a new approach to the theory of space. Against philosophy he holds that although its beginnings “were closely bound up with the ‘real’ space of the Greek city,” this “connection was severed later in philosophy’s 2 For a critical survey of the history of ecocriticism and its future, see Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). C ATRIN G ERSDORF 24 development” (14). And the problem with literary texts is that “any search for space […] will find it everywhere and in every guise: enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about” (15). This suggests that space, in its philosophical and literary representations, is either dissociated from the social and historical realities that otherwise sustain the philosophical practitioner of spatial theory; or, because it is a ubiquitous metaphoric and symbolic presence, space is distorted beyond conceptual recognition and, therefore, useless as a model for a unified theory. Yet Lefebvre does not completely abandon the idea that philosophical and literary texts participate in the production of space, that the space conceived by philosophy and literature, socially abstracted and symbolically congested though it may be, effects the production of “the practico-sensory realm of social space” (15). He observed that the common terms we use to speak of individual spaces (“room,” “street corner,” “marketplace”) “correspond to a specific use of that space, and hence to a spatial practice that they express and constitute” (16). This double function of language - to “express” and to “constitute,” to simultaneously represent and produce a reality - is one of the two major theoretical premises on which the argument of this essay is built. The other is closely related to the need to advocate for the literary as a valuable epistemological and pedagogical instrument. Following Jonathan Culler’s The Literary in Theory (2007), I take a functionalist approach to the literary as a cognitive tool, a specific mode of theoretical speculation. “Theory,” Culler writes, “is analytical, speculative, reflexive, interdisciplinary, and a counter to commonsense views” (4). The sentence would remain accurate if ‘theory’ were replaced by ‘poetry’ or ‘the novel.’ 3 De facto Culler makes that rhetorical move when he wonders “if theory is the exfoliation, in the sphere of thought in general, of the literary” (39). The association of theory, the literary, and thought through the arboreal metaphor of “exfoliation” demands closer consideration. While the literary is the ‘foliage’ that ‘veils’ the ‘stem’ of thought, rendering the trunk almost invisible for most of the time, foliage is also vital to the stem’s vitality and robustness. No tree survives without its leaves. At the same time, foliage withers away as soon as it is separated from the stem. It disintegrates and becomes something else, the humus that feeds the tree’s roots. In Culler’s metaphor, theory is not an expression of thought itself. Rather, it reveals a relationship of codependence between thought (or knowledge) and the literary. Based on such a conceptual approach to the literary as a vital element of thought, I propose a reading of Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) as a novel that provides new ‘theoretical’ perspectives on the spatial relationship between nature and culture. I will develop my argument in three major steps. First, I will trace the place and function of the city in American literary culture. Second, I will offer a reading of Morrison’s Jazz that focuses on the narrative production of urban 3 Needless to say, not all poems, or all books sold under the label of the novel, are of the same textual complexity, analytical acuity, reflexive fervor, or interdisciplinary scope. Nature in the Grid 25 space and its relationship to non-urban environments. Third, I will position the novel in the discursive context of new urbanism, arguing that Morrison’s narrative carnivalizations of the urban grid support the ecocritical project of reconstructing the conceptual relationship between nature and culture. Nature and the Grid: American Literature and the Space of the City View of Savannah presents wilderness and grid as two historically and ecologically different spaces - the precolonial, precontact ‘natural’ space of indigenous America, and the colonial, Europeanized ‘cultural’ space of modern America. While we may have come to identify it with the production of modern American spaces, the gridiron pattern has in fact a much longer, culturally and geographically diverse history. The first urban grids date back more than four thousand years, when gridiron patterns became the tool “for administering natural and human resources” (Higgins 52) in old Egyptian cities. Since then all major civilizations have utilized the grid as an instrument for organizing and regulating various kinds of relationships, including their spatial relationship with nature. 4 By the time it arrived in colonial America, the grid did not only represent the principles of efficiency, rationality, and calculability 5 but also the desire 4 The grid made its debut around 2670 BCE in Kahun, an old Egyptian pyramid town whose administrators and bureaucrats created a “highly sophisticated system for administering natural and human resources” (52). No longer “merely reactive” (50) to preexisting architectural and topographical forms, Kahun’s urban grid of streets and alleys was inspired by the patterns on ruled inscriptions of papyrus. Summarizing archeological research, Higgins writes that in Kahun “scribes planned the design and construction of two types of housing units, each intended for a separate social stratum, and each virtually identical to others of its kind. The regularity of these homes carried over to the gridiron of the streets, suggesting a highly regulated relationship between the members of each stratum. In other words, the housing module and the linear grid of the street were coordinated to promote class-based human behavior originating in administration” (52- 53). The need for bureaucratic efficiency in the management and regulation of a socially stratified society dictated the application of the grid in the urban design of ancient Egyptian cities, but it was not necessarily the reason for its use in other cultures and at later points in history. In ancient Greece, where geometry was perceived as the principle that defined the order of Nature, the city grid “reflected religious and spiritual principles and motivations” (57), and coordinated axes created “sight flows” (61) that granted “visual continuity with the natural environment” (60). The grid structure in the widely dispersed settlements of the Roman Empire meant predictability: the spatial forms and functions of Roman settlements resembled each other throughout the colonized territories. The European Renaissance, with its “predilection for regular geometry and human scale” (66), saw the grid as a measure to eradicate crimes committed in the dark and winding medieval streets and to foster the development of capitalist commerce. 5 In his essay on “The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning” (1986), Jack H. Williamson links the modern conception of the grid to Descartes who defined it in purely geometrical terms as a composite of axes and coordinates on a plane in space. Williamson observes that “with Descartes’s stress on abstraction, the grid’s association with the world of out- C ATRIN G ERSDORF 26 to gain power over nature. Higgins points out that William Penn’s 1683 gridiron design for Philadelphia can be linked to the fact that he “had witnessed the devastation of London during the plague and fires of the 1660s” and “intended to prevent such catastrophes in the future” (68). The grid’s spaciousness and regularity were perceived as the form that allowed disasters such as those that occurred in European cities to be managed effectively, if not always prevented. Fires could be contained more easily, sanitary conditions controlled more efficiently. Yet neither the idea nor the spatial reality of the grid necessarily mollified existing cultural prejudices towards the city as a space that severely compromises the moral respectability of its inhabitants and the virtuousness of its institutions. Thomas Jefferson, who favored a gridiron pattern for organizing the lands of the Western Territory and as in instrument for preserving the democratic vigor of the Republic, retained his general skepticism towards the city as a space that endangers rather than benefits democracy. 6 During his tenure in Paris he sent a letter to James Madison, dated Dec. 20, 1787, in which he expressed his view that Americans and their “governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.” Yet “when they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe” (Jefferson 1787). His “Opinion on Capital” (1790), a text that details his ideas for the production of the nation’s most representative urban space, documents Jefferson’s resolve to apply rational principles to the building of American cities: “For the President’s house, offices and gardens, I should think two squares should be consolidated. For the Capitol and offices, one square. For the market, one square. For the public walks, nine squares consolidated” (Jefferson 1790). In Measuring America (2002), Andro Linklater observed that for Jefferson, “the simplicity of the square […] made it democratic” (111). And in Place and Belonging in America (2002), David Jacobson describes the application of the rectangular grid in the production of American space as motivated by the assumption that the “rationalization of the landscape created reasoned and rational citizens, in contrast to the wild and untamed woods and its wild and er appearance loosens. As the rules elaborated in the Discourse made clear, appearances are suspect, and a problem (or, in visual terms, a field) is to be divided into its smallest component parts. This geometric, reductive operation is, of course, a mental process. The grid thus comes to represent not only the structural laws and principles behind physical appearance, but the process of rational thinking itself” (20). The grid’s inherent value as a code for rationality made it attractive when it came to the territorial organization of the North American continent. 6 In this regard Jefferson’s thinking resembles that of John Locke, who preferred the term “common-wealth” over “city” as the name for the democratic and independent “society of men” he envisioned in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Although etymologically related to civitas, Locke cautioned his readers that city in English does not signify the same things as its Latin ancestor. He does not elaborate on the meaning of “city” in seventeenth-century English, but we can safely assume that he had in mind a combination of Christian doctrine (the City upon a Hill but also the city as cesspool of vice) and the experience of cities as emerging centers of England’s economic, social, and cultural life. Nature in the Grid 27 untamed progeny” (95). Yet in spite of the grid’s reputation as the most rational and democratic form of producing space, and contrary to the fact that most American cities are built on a grid pattern, the rejection of the city remained a constant in the American cultural imaginary. In a letter in 1800 to Benjamin Rush, a Pennsylvanian physician and one of the nation’s Founding Fathers, Jefferson declared that he “view[ed] great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True,” he further elaborated, “they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice” (Jefferson in 1800). 7 During the following two centuries, writers (at least those who represented mainstream American culture) did little, if anything, to challenge the anti-urban sentiments embedded in the Jeffersonian concepts of a democratic society. Urban spaces have been a trope in American literature since the days of the early republic. But most writers did not perceive the city as a space of American self-creation and self-representation. The city experience of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn is dominated by disease, crime, and mistrust. Edgar Allan Poe’s city in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) is a gloomy space populated by noblemen, merchants, and attorneys as well as gamblers, prostitutes, and pickpockets. The foreignness of such a place is highlighted by the identification of the city as London. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) the town is a place of social control, contrasted with the forest as the location of the (female) body’s liberation from the moral and religious constraints of the Puritan community. The poetic power of his language and the lyrical energy radiating from his fiction find their main source in the symbolism of natural environments. When representing urban space, Hawthorne’s language does not lose its poetic intensity, but it underwrites the author’s quintessential aversion against the city, which, in “The Gray Champion” (1837), he described as a “paved solitude” and the home of “despotic rulers 7 In January of 1819, a few months after the founding of the University of Virginia, Jefferson reported to his former secretary, William Short, that the university was ready to hire seven professors, “the ablest that America or Europe can furnish” and who “will give us the selected society of a great city separated from the dissipations and levities of its ephemeral insects” (Jefferson 1819). Clearly, Jefferson was not willing to give up the “elegant arts” entirely. The idea of the city as the pivot of education and as a gathering place of great literary, scientific, and philosophical minds was of more than rhetorical appeal to him. But when it came to the city as a real space of lived social and political experiences, Jefferson’s rhetoric remained dismissive throughout his entire life. It is an historical irony that by advocating the grid as the tool for creating the plots that could be worked by the independent farmer-citizen, Jefferson also provided the blueprint for building American cities. As landscape historian J.B. Jackson observed, with a few notable exceptions, “the cities built in the United States until late in the nineteenth century all conformed to the grid system; all were Jeffersonian” (Jackson 4). For Jefferson and his peers, the perfect geometry of the grid, a composite structure of equally sized modules, became “the symbol of an agrarian Utopia composed of a democratic society of small landowners” (op. cit. 5). C ATRIN G ERSDORF 28 […], all magnificently clad, flushed with wine, proud of unjust authority, and scoffing at the universal groan” (864). Unlike Hawthorne, who found most of his material in America’s colonial history, Melville responded to cultural and individual experiences with the modern city. The protagonist in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) is a man who is first trapped in the nineteenth-century version of an office cubicle, then disappears in the great unknown of a city that erases nature as well as human beings. Searching for Bartleby in the streets of New York, the narrator eventually finds him in a prison yard resembling the “heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung” (Melville 45). The structural form of this sentence, in which the cycle of botanical life is squeezed into the syntactical space between two commas, mimics the theme of human existence in the geometrical space of the city’s grid. The allusion to pyramids, those monuments of death, further amplifies the trope of contrasting the organic and the architectural, wild nature and urban civilization. Melville’s New York emblematizes prevailing nineteenth-century fears about the city as a space that jeopardizes both the American ideology of self-reliant individualism and nature (the space from which the self-reliant individual emerges). In its entirety, the text of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” provides the poetic image for an observation Ralph Waldo Emerson had made more than a decade earlier: “In New York lately, as in cities generally, one seems to lose all substance, and become surface in a world of surfaces” (165). At the time, New York was on its way to becoming a “new metropolis” (cf. Spann 1981), growing steadily in population and expanding in space, a process that was accelerated by the segmentation of the land into a gridiron pattern of streets and building lots. With the city’s spatial expansion grew the anti-urban sentiments among the nation’s leading intellectuals. In contrast to their African American contemporaries, many of them slaves for whom the city was a space that provided a greater degree of freedom than the plantation, the white writers of the American Renaissance countered the increasing influence of the city on the shaping of American culture with a rhetoric that celebrated wild nature, and a narrative structure that followed the pastoral logic of retreat (into nature), but often forsaking the second part of that dualism - the return of the regenerated self to the city. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a nonfiction account of life in a solitary hut by a forest pond, is the most prominent example of mid-nineteenth-century literary anti-urbanism. Published a year after Melville’s “Bartleby,” Thoreau presents Walden as a place of calm and contemplation, a pastoral landscape still in touch with human culture but at a safe distance from “restless city merchants” (191) and an environment where life follows the rhythm of machines and markets rather than the sun. For Thoreau, urbanity means mechanization, industrialization, rationalization, and self-distancing from nature. In Walden, the city is at times an organism, brashly feeding off the land (“All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city.” 191); then again it is a Nature in the Grid 29 machine that transforms nature into useful commodities (“Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen.” ibid.). But most of all, it is a bookish place of “readers” rather than “seers” (187), and an environment detrimental to the development of the intellect: “up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them” (191). While the urban grid is not an element that appears on Walden’s narrative surface, the concepts and ideas it embodies - rationalization, control, and the transformation of nature into property - are the targets of Thoreau’s cultural criticism. Among the writers of the American Renaissance, Poe and Melville were perhaps the only ones who were simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the city as a modern social, economic, and cultural space. Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is a narrative that produces the spatial presence of the city by dint of its flâneur-narrator whose wanderings and observations literally plot the story. In Melville’s Wall Street story the geometry of urban modernity is represented metonymically, in the narrative’s core symbol of the office as a room without a view and a space that is defined by the solid architecture of brick walls. Poe and Melville differ from their contemporaries (Emerson, Thoreau) in that they both wrote at least one story each that anticipated modes of representing urban space that will come to dominate the literature of modernism. But like their contemporaries they perceived city and nature as mutually exclusive spaces. For Heinz Ickstadt, author of an essay on “The City in English Canadian and US-American Literature” (1991), the writers of the American Renaissance represent the first of five aesthetically distinct yet historically intersecting modes 8 of “fictional responses” (165) to the American city. One can also understand these modes as paradigms of the literary production of urban space in America. The writers of the first paradigm, who see “the concept of individualism as sanctioned by nature” (165), simply turn their back on the city, as do the New Yorkers in the opening chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Their fantasies and desires are nourished by the unruly ocean, not the ruled geometry of the city. It is out there, in the wild open space of the sea, that they hope to find themselves, not in the “lanes and alleys, streets and avenues” (Melville 19) of the city. We can still hear echoes of nineteenth-century anxieties about the devastating effects of urban spaces on the self in the late twentieth century, in, for instance, Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985). The novel begins with the narrative voice describing New York as “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps” that always leaves Quinn, the detective/ writer protagonist, “with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the 8 Ickstadt actually speaks of “five different phases” (165), a terminology that emphasizes historical chronology rather than aesthetic structure. These periods are the eras of romanticism, naturalism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism. However, Ickstadt admits that “such a linear history of the genre is highly dubious” and that “there is always a continuing of, or a returning to, preceding models of narration” (168), which is why I use the term “mode” in my summary of his model. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 30 city, but within himself as well” (Auster 3-4). However, Auster’s postmodern New Yorker no longer has an ocean to remedy his proprioceptive pain, only the titular city of glass, a fragile system of abstract signs and occult symbols, which may or may not spell out the meaning of life as it unfolds in urban space. Yet in order to regain a sense of self, of who he is in relation to this environment, the protagonist needs to decipher the city like a text, and nature is only a distraction from that task. In a highly ironic reversal of Romantic responses to the city, Auster’s protagonist refuses to succumb to the “temptation” of a “bright May morning” and its “call to wander aimlessly in the air” by “positioning himself with his back to the window” (41) and opening a book about the myths of Paradise and Babel. Joining ranks with Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme, the two writers Ickstadt chose to represent his fifth paradigm, Auster’s city is “less an identifiable geographical unit than a linguistic and semiotic space, a network of self-referential signs and systems of communication” (Ickstadt 168). For Ickstadt, the postmodern practice of approaching the city as structural inspiration, and no longer as “theme and object,” constitutes “the most radical and most complete response of the literary imagination to the overwhelming presence of the city” (168). At the end of the twentieth century, postmodern novelists continue the Romantic tradition of perceiving the city as a space that has the power to obliterate the individual self; but their narratives no longer offer the flight to nature as a possible route of escape from such a destiny. Ickstadt’s three remaining modes can be regarded as aesthetic milestones on the way from Romantic towards postmodern literary and intellectual approaches to the city. What these modes have in common is the elimination of (nonhuman) nature from the realm of the city. The writers of the second paradigm, among them William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, replace the “old dichotomy of Nature vs. City” (166) with a new dichotomy of urban interiority vs. exteriority, protected vs. unprotected spaces; and they fictionalize America’s social and cultural anxieties about the dissolution of traditional hierarchies by juxtaposing “the civilized space of the living room or the salon” with “the chaotic movement of the city street” (166). Ickstadt draws on Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) to illustrate the third mode of literary responses to urbanity in which the city replaces nature as the mythic center of the American Dream. As “object and agent of desire” (166), Chicago and New York “appear as a truly new world” (166), one that offers “an inexhaustible promise of fulfillment” (167). The writers of the Lost Generation, most of them literary modernists, represent Ickstadt’s fourth mode. The city is now perceived as “a complete technological environment as well as an expanding semiotic field” (167). John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), the quintessential modern American city novel, is a narrative collage of urban discourses (“popular songs, brand names, advertisements, newspaper headlines,” 167) and a textual hodgepodge of social characters and cultures. The experimental character of the novel’s narrative structure, the telegraphic style of its sentences, and the author’s refusal to Nature in the Grid 31 focus on one protagonist (not counting the city itself) reflects the fast pace of the city and the ephemeral character of the modern urban experience. Nature is not completely absent from this environment - one can hear the chirping of sparrows above the roofs, occasionally smell scents of the sea wafting through the streets, see “a bright runnel of water in the ditch, flowing through patches of grass and dandelions” (Dos Passos 109) - but images of nature signify what is far away, unreachable, residual, or merely a memory of the past when Broadway “was all meadows” (227). In The Day of the Locust (1939), Nathanael West addresses the defeat of nature by the city through even more poignant imagery. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere 9 , West’s Los Angeles is a city in which natura naturata exists, though barely, in “the remains of a cactus garden in which a few ragged, tortured plants still survived” (West 89). More often, it is a simulation or imitation of the “real thing” - “a lawn of fiber,” “a cellophane waterfall,” and “cardboard food” (131). Read against the background of Manhattan Transfer, West’s relentless metaphors of agony and artificiality expose the inherently pastoral character of a simile like Dos Passos’s “birchlike cluster of downtown buildings” (229), a rhetorical figure in which trees bestow poetic qualities on architectural objects. Through the use of metaphor, Dos Passos seeks to preserve the presence of nature (as well as the literary authority it enjoys in the American cultural imaginary) in the textual space of the city. Yet ultimately, and much like West, he sees city and nature as existential counterpoints. There is one major difference though: while Dos Passos still believes in the possibility of turning one’s back on the city and finding a better life elsewhere (although not necessarily in a more pastoral environment), the nature-culture conflict in West’s novel finds its only dénouement in the apocalyptic demise of the city. Manhattan Transfers ends by zooming in on Jimmy Herf, hitching a ride on a furniture truck that would take him “pretty far” (360) away from the city. 10 The Day of the Locust ends in scenes of a violent mass riot, an event that provides the painter-protagonist Todd Hackett with the images that allow him to finish a canvas called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” In his essay, Ickstadt shows how the phenomenon of the modern city shaped the thematic and narrative structure of the nineteenthand twentiethcentury American novel. The epitome of modern cultural, social, and spatial 9 Catrin Gersdorf, “Nathanael West, the American Renaissance, and Literary History as Cultural Ecology” (2005). 10 On the ferryboat that takes him across the Hudson River to the mainland, Jimmy spots “a brokendown springwagon […] stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia” (Dos Passos 359). He finds the “rich smell of maytime earth […], of wet flowerpots and greenhouses” enticing and considers asking the driver “where he is going with all those flowers” (ibid.), but then stifles the impulse. While this image evokes the possibility of escape from the city into a more pastoral landscape, even if it is only for a brief moment, it seems odd that the wagon actually transports the rich, organic objects from the city to the countryside, and not vice versa. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 32 experiences, the city became an important catalyst for literary innovation. But can the novel also stimulate new modes of seeing and knowing the space of the city? The following reading is based on the thesis that Jazz is a novel that unwittingly but effectively contributes to new urbanism’s project of putting nature back into the grid of the American city. Jazz : The Trace of Wild in the Urban Grid Toni Morrison’s Jazz is the second in a series of three novels in which the author investigates the cultural spaces, psychological legacies, and mythical dimensions of African American history since the nineteenth century. The first novel, Beloved (1987), examines the traumatic experience of slavery and is set in the Kentucky/ Ohio borderland. Paradise (1999), the third novel, probes the effects of the civil rights era in an all-black, small-town community on the edge of the American heartland in Oklahoma. Jazz (1992), the center piece of the trilogy, focuses on New York City, one of the major destinations for those African Americans who left the rural South during the era of the Great Migration. First and foremost, the novel is a jazzed-up literary blues about a love triangle, its tragic ending, and the melancholy of its memory. On the first three and a half pages Morrison presents us with the entire story: Violet, a woman of “fifty, but still good looking” (4), “used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue” (3). Violet’s husband, Joe Trace, “fell for an eighteen-year-old girl [Dorcas] with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going” (3). Joe was never held legally responsible by the law “because nobody actually saw him” (4) shoot the girl. 11 But Violet punishes him, releases the birds from their cage, embarrasses herself at Dorcas’s funeral by desecrating the dead girl’s face, starts visiting Dorcas’s aunt, curious to find out more about the girl who lured her husband away, and finally goes out to find herself a boyfriend. Joe endures all this and pays no attention to his wife’s love affair. At the end of this account, the nameless narrator reveals that she expected the Traces’ home “to be a mighty bleak household, what with the birds gone and the two of them wiping their cheeks all day” (6). But with the arrival of spring the Traces’ lives and home are revitalized - by a young girl who enters “the building with an Okeh record under her arm and carrying some stewmeat wrapped in butcher paper” (6). Violet invites her into the apartment, and that, the narrator concludes, was “how that scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue began. What turned out different was who shot whom” (7). Strangely enough, this presumably second shooting is an obscure comment on an 11 Towards the end of the novel the reader finds out that Joe did not kill, but only wounded Dorcas, who ends up bleeding to death because no ambulance would respond to “colored people calling” (210). Nature in the Grid 33 event that will remain absent from the rest of the narrative. Yet it functions as the rhetorical equivalent of the blue note, that flattened third in jazz that produces the musical pathos of impending tragedy and lingering melancholy. It is this story, developed along a bass line of passion that sustains a multivocal 12 conversation about trust and betrayal, exaltation and moodiness, love and jealousy, that best explains Morrison’s choice of “jazz” for her novel’s title. But like its musical namesake, Jazz can also be read as an allegory of urbanization. Borrowing a phrase from African American poet Cecil S. Giscombe, the novel can be described as an improvisation on the theme of “the melodious southern wild coming into the city” (10). In Jazz, this process is accounted for on several narrative levels. Joe and Violet Trace come to New York from rural Virginia as part of the so-called Great Migration, which began in the late 1890s and peaked in the 1920s when Harlem became the “Negro capital of the world” (Claude McKay). Long sections of the book recount Joe and Violet’s past life in the South. The landscape of Virginia is not only presented as their ‘original’ home but becomes the device through which Morrison explicates her protagonists’ character and present behavior. As one of Morrison’s mythical figures, Joe Trace’s mother is “not a real woman but a ‘vision’” shaped like “a naked berry-black woman” who is “covered with mud and leaves are in her hair” (144). She is pregnant when Golden Gray, another of the novel’s Southern characters, spots her “in the trees” (144). And because of her appearance, he calls her Wild, the only name by which she will be known through the entire novel. Wild gives birth to a baby boy, but she leaves him to be raised by another family, who call him Joe. Asking his adoptive mother about his biological parents, Joe learns that “they disappeared without a trace” (124). “The way I heard it,” he explains, “I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me” (124). This dialogue reworks Joe’s function in the novel in Lacanian terms. By relocating her protagonist’s origin point from the realm of myth and nature into the symbolic realm of language, Morrison expands Joe Trace’s protagonistic function as fictional representative of specific social and historical experiences, now also rendering ‘Joe Trace’ as a floating signifier, leaving it to the reader to determine what it signifies. Or perhaps not leaving it completely to the reader’s interpretive caprices. For as Jonathan Culler observed, “the most radical play of the signifier still requires and works through the positing of signifieds” (qtd. in Chandler 2002: 74). And Morrison directs that “positing” in several ways, most effectively through the puns on “wild” and “trace” in telling the story of Joe and Violet. In the semiotic order of Jazz, Joe literally is the Trace of Southern Wild that survives in the urban grid of the Northern city, an image further reinforced by Violet’s floral name. The bathos attached to a flower that common- 12 Although Jazz has a principal narrator who appears at the beginning and initiates the story-telling, the novel’s structure is such that provides significant narrative space to the voices and perspectives of various other characters. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 34 ly symbolizes modesty and virtue is counterbalanced when, by the simple act of adding one letter, Violet becomes Violent - which is what neighbors begin to call her after the incident at Dorcas’s funeral. Growing up in the South, an apprentice-hunter learning “how to fool snakes, bend twigs and string to catch rabbits, groundhog; make a sound waterfowl couldn’t resist” (125), Joe is “more comfortable in the woods than in a town” (126). Reflecting on this time in his life and sounding somewhat surprised about the leap he has taken from the narrated past in the woods to the narrative present in the city, Joe says: “Folks thought I was the one to be counted on never to be able to stomach a city. Piled-up buildings? Cement paths? Me? Not me” (126). When the Traces first arrive, they find “a railroad flat in the tenderloin,” then move further south to “the stink of Mulberry Street and Little Africa,” and later back north again to “the flesh-eating rats on West Fifty-third” (127). Eventually, hard work and the changing housing market in early twentieth-century New York make it possible for this African American couple to progress “uptown” where “row houses and single ones” have “big yards and vegetable gardens” (127), and where they can create their private Eden, an urban pastoral of “birds and plants everywhere” (127). On a mimetic level, Joe and Violet’s movement from downtown slum to uptown garden represents the trajectory of African American social and economic progress in the early twentieth century. On the semiotic level, where floating signifiers produce meaning by latching themselves to each other rather than to their nontextual referents, Joe and Violet’s spatial movement signifies the resilient presence of wild nature in the grid of the city’s “laid-out roads” (120). In the ‘mental’ space of Morrison’s fictional New York City, nature is an ineradicable presence. It exists in that space either unexpectedly and in spite of itself (Joe), or as a mixture of beauty and irrational cruelty (Violet/ Violent). The story of Joe and Violet Trace links the urban-industrial North with the rural-agricultural South. Because they share the same narrative space (the text of Morrison’s novel), the existing conceptual boundaries that separate the city from the country, rural from urban America, begin to crumble, and readers begin to realize that nature cannot be abstracted from the social and cultural space that is the city. Nor are the differences between nature and culture always visible. In a brilliant passage at the beginning of Jazz, Morrison presents the imaginative dissolution of the nature-culture antagonism as the enthusiastic narrator’s identification with “the City”: Daylight slants like a razor cutting the building in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible - like the City in 1926 when all wars are over and there will never be another one. (7) Nature in the Grid 35 To the extent that the narrator is unable to perceive the difference between “people” and “the work of stonemasons,” between anatomy and architecture, the organic and the inorganic, landscape and cityscape, Morrison’s novel refuses to recognize traditional conceptual boundaries separating nature and the grid. The syntactical conjunction of river, church, and apartment buildings (or homes) produces a unified urban vista in which ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ elements coexist. Moreover, given that river, church, and home are three of the most conspicuous coordinates in the cultural landscape of the South, the passage also functions like a palimpsest, where the actual, visible reality is scraped and its residual surface layered with the memory of a distant landscape. Located at the very beginning of the novel, this vista introduces the theme of Southern presence in the North which, as we have seen, will be developed in more detail by an ensemble of voices engaged in telling the story of Joe and Violet. The end result is Jazz, a fictional account of a significant period in the cultural history of African Americans that also promotes what urban design theorist Sanford Kwinter, in a different context, called “a pastoral urbanism of inflection” (31). Inspired by the image of a shepherd closely observing and then responding to “the unfolding life of the flock, its movements, its collective affects, the flow of the continually reshaping mass and the flow of the landscape in continuous interaction” (ibid.), Kwinter sees this new, dynamic concept of urbanism as the mental prerequisite for revitalizing the space of the city. He urges urban designers and architects to adapt their work to the spatial forces that are already operative in the city rather than vice versa, adapting the city to the definitive forms of their designs. Kwinter’s pastoral urbanism is suggestive of the dynamics that underlie the way in which Jazz ‘thinks’ urban space. 13 Morrison inflects existing notions of urban spatiality - traditionally perceived as “piled-up buildings” and “cement paths,” as the regular grid that displaced irregular nature - by carnivalizing its gridded structure with traces of the wild, thus presenting urban space as an ecological (and historical) hybrid. As in the Bakhtinian carnival, which signifies the temporary suspension rather than the complete destruction of existing social orders and hierarchies, the spatial order of the city (crystallized in the grid) is not fundamentally challenged in Morrison’s novel. Yet Jazz definitely suspends traditional perceptions of the city as a space that is disconnected from the natural world, thus doing in fiction what new urbanists do in the social realm, and cultural critics, historians, and geographers in the discursive realm. 13 I am adopting the terminology Nancy Armstrong introduced in How Novels Think (2005). She suggests that the British novel was “thinking up” (3), or producing, the modern individual in a narrative process of “invalidat[ing] competing notions of the subject” (ibid.) that had emerged in philosophy, science, and fiction during the period covered by her study. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 36 Nature in the Grid: Jazz , New Urbanism, and the Practice of Ecocriticism William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), an environmental history of Chicago, was one of the first histories of a city premised on the author’s realization that the opposition between city and country, nature and civilization is “far more ideological than real” (16), a remark that implies the need to revise the narrative conventions and rhetorical figurations that support the dogma of separation. Cronon’s own historical narrative eradicates the perceptual boundaries between one of the United States’ most representative modern cities and its nonurban hinterland; and it exposes “the common past” (19) of industrial Chicago and the agricultural Great West. In the two decades that followed the publication of Nature’s Metropolis, other writers joined Cronon’s project. Sagebrush and Cappuccino: Confessions of an L.A. Naturalist (1995) is David Wicinas’s account of “reconciling” his life of “a caféhopping boulevardier” (1) with the “little forest ranger within me” (2) who followed the Hemingway code of manly life in the world that “lay beyond the asphalt grid” (3). Suggesting to his readers that the small natural oases within metropolitan Los Angeles “might help refresh your soul, especially if it is feeling a little withered from living in the city” (6), he casts nature and the city as spaces that affect people in fundamentally different ways. While such individual comments may perpetuate the perceptual and experiential separation of nature and the grid, the narrative of Sagebrush and Cappuccino as a whole guides readers in the direction of recognizing that Los Angeles is a megalopolis with a “rich natural history” (5). Charles Siebert’s Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral (1998) is much more self-consciously Thoreauvian in approach, but it is far from being nostalgic in tone. Wickerby describes the process by which the author comes to “see the streets that bind these buildings, or the parked cars, or the bent metal trash container on the corner of Washington and Lincoln, or even our trash […] as anything but what they all are: extensions of us, and therefore, of nature” (179). Matthew Gandy’s Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (2002), Lisa Benton-Short and John Rennie Short’s Cities and Nature (2008), and Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York (2009) 14 take a more academic approach to conceptual and perceptual reconfigurations of the relationship between nature and the grid. But they share with each other, and with Wicinas and Siebert, an interest in integrating nature into what we can call, with Lefebvre, the ‘mental’ space of urbanity. 15 For geographer Matthew Gandy, the intellec- 14 See also The Mannahatta Project, the online version of the book, which contains interactive maps and other resources for teachers, students, and researchers at <http: / / themannahattaproject.org> (accessed 23 June 2010). 15 The history of New York’s Central Park may serve as an illustration for the influential power of the mental space of urbanity on the physical and social space that is the city. Tracing the impact of literary ideas on the creation of one of the most famous urban parks, Adam Sweeting (1999) writes: “The literary tale told by Central Park was perhaps Nature in the Grid 37 tual work of “radically reworking the relationship between nature and culture” (5) is an indispensable prerequisite for countering the ideology of antiurbanism that is a vital element in American culture and “a powerful current running through Western environmental thought” (7). Thwarting the rhetoric of antimodern nostalgia in popular ecological thought, Gandy proposes abandoning the conception of the modern city as the anti-thesis of nature and, instead, conceiving of it as the product of “a historical and political process” he calls the “urbanization of nature” (5). For many practitioners of ecocriticism, particularly in the US-American context, this is exactly the process that needs to be halted, if not reversed - by the promotion of nature writing rather than urban novels, and by images and metaphors that expose the city as a cancer on the skin of the earth. Yet while the polemical force of such metaphors, and their usefulness as ecological wake-up calls, may be undeniable, they are less effective in providing paradigms for reconceptualizing the nature-culture relationship. The only treatment or remedy proposed is total eradication, which in the Judeo-Christian tradition that shaped the cultural imagination of the West, is in its narrative form nothing less than apocalyptic. One of the most prominent recent examples for narrating the apocalyptic downfall of a city in order to communicate an environmentalist message is Roland Emmerich’s film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), in which nature (metonymically represented by a gigantic flood wave) invades the grid of New York City. Emmerich’s film was rather successful in popularizing discussions of global warming, at least in Germany. Yet as effective as the apocalyptic scenario may be on the visual level - viewers vicariously witness the environmental effects of global warming - on the epistemological level of providing new conceptual ‘visions’ of the natureculture relationship it fails. Premised on narrative scenarios of cataclysmic destruction, on a psychology of fear, and on the presentation of nature as a force that will always triumph over culture, stories of environmental apocalypse can function as an effective counterpoint to narratives of cultural hubris. Yet in order to achieve this effect, apocalyptic narratives must assume best exemplified in the life and work of the many authors who campaigned for its construction” (93) - among them Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, and Charles F. Briggs. Frederick Law Olmsted, the man most often associated with the design of the park, had a successful career as a journalist before he became one of the nineteenth century’s most famous landscape architects. Between 1790 and 1850, New York City grew from a town of c. 33,000 to over half a million inhabitants. By the time Central Park opened in 1859, the city had grown by another 300,000 residents. Fears about the city’s economic and social collapse were a psychological corollary of such rapid growth, at least among New York’s powerful. Creating a city park was seen as a countermeasure. “When they spoke of nature, park advocates referred to a man-centered cosmos in which the natural realm functioned as a beneficent, orderly presence” (95). However, in order to make room for that presence, New York removed 1,600 residents from the land on which Central Park was to be built. These residents were poor immigrants and members of one of the city’s most prominent African American community at the time. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 38 that nature is “a site of treacherous and vindictive forces bent on retribution for her human violation” (Soper 71), thus reinforcing the conceptual separation between nature and culture. With my reading of Jazz I demonstrated that nature’s ‘invasion’ of the city grid can be narrated as a non-destructive process. But more importantly, it proves that an ecocritical pedagogy does not depend on the genre of nature writing, nor is it bound to an apocalyptic rhetoric or narratives of antiurbanism. Nature in the Grid 39 Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988. Bennett, Michael, and David Teague, eds. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 1999. Benton-Short, Lisa, and John Rennie Short. Cities and Nature. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. “Charter of the New Urbanism.” Congress for the New Urbanism. 28 Sep. 2009 <http: / / www.cnu.org/ charter>. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1991. Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Dos Passos, John. 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Kwinter, Sanford. “Politics and Pastoralism.” Assemblage 27 (Aug. 1995): 25-32. C ATRIN G ERSDORF 40 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Linklater, Andro. Measuring America: How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689. Ed. with an introd. and notes by Peter Laslett. Cambridge et al: Cambridge UP, 1988. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. 1992. New York: Plume 1993. Ross, Andrew (Interviewed by Michael Bennett). “The Social Claim of Urban Ecology.” The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Ed. Michael Bennett and David Teague. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 1999. 15-30. Sanderson, Eric W. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York. New York: Abrams, 2009. Siebert, Charles. Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral. 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L EYLA H AFERKAMP “Somebody’s got to get angry…”: Ecoterrorism in the Work of Carl Hiaasen Transnaturation From a cultural studies perspective, ‘transculturation’ has been defined by Mary Louise Pratt as “a phenomenon of the contact zone” (6) that emerges from within the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4). In Pratt’s specific context of eighteenth-century colonial history, the focus is set on the reciprocity immanent to the tranculturation process with the aim to “foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination” (7). Accordingly, transcultural spaces are understood as zones of cultural interaction, in which encounters between a dominant cultural code and its subordinated others take place; the notion of transculturation addresses the reciprocal exchange such confrontations lead to. “While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture,” Pratt argues, “they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for.” (6). While delivering a detailed account of the complex cultural history of the contact zone, Pratt observes that, in the given context, the natural environment has often been rendered a mere epiphenomenon of the transculturation process. With the naturalist figuring as the culturalist’s sidekick, the unidirectional efforts to semanticize natural elements and systematize the untamed chaos of the natural environment into scientific categories (30) have served the ideals of progress propagated by a decidedly homocentric agenda. “Such a perspective,” Pratt adds, “may seem odd to late twentieth-century western imagination trained to see nature as self-balancing ecosystems which human interventions throw into chaos” (31). Not only does such a perspective seem odd, but it also implies a reduction of complexity. To an ecocritical mindset skeptical of exclusively homocentric approaches, the restriction of transculturation to the social interaction between human subjects and human subjects only seems no longer a tenable standpoint. Today, the ecologically modified version of transculturation should also encompass the asymmetrical relations between ‘culture’s nature’ on the one hand and ‘Nature itself’ on the other. This expanded version also includes all processes of transnaturation between the colonists’ dominant cultivating schemes, according to which nature is treated as mere instrument, L EYLA H AFERKAMP 42 and colonized nature’s subordinated wildness and intrinsic value. Transnaturation comes as a ‘clash of natures,’ as the encounter between tamed and instrumentalized nature and its subordinated other, i.e., pristine nature that has retained its inherent value. As the domination of the latter by the former seems to be the rule, the infiltration of the dominant cultural code by the ‘wild’ and untamed forces of nature forms the counter-current in the transnatural space of the contact zone. This is the kind of reciprocal exchange Henry David Thoreau had in mind in his 1862 essay “Walking,” when he pleaded for the poet who, in defiance of increasingly more materialistic tendencies in society, was to “give expression to Nature” by “transplant[ing] [the words] to his page with earth adhering to their roots” (179). In fact, in “Walking” Thoreau literally walks out on the cultural establishment of his time and the homocentric “degeneracy” (166) surrounding him, in search of “a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure” (175). His solitary walk can be read as the first environmentalist protest march in American history: I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that. (161, emphasis added) Although Thoreau, at first sight, seems to adopt a wildly romantic position diametrically opposed to the one propagated by civilization, he leads what he calls a border life, “on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss trooper” (186). In the manner of the seventeenth-century raiders who dwelled in the marshy boundary zone between England and Scotland, Thoreau situates himself somewhere in between the grid of fenced property and the unbounded expanses of open space, assuming a ‘pirate identity’ that belongs neither to the former nor to the latter, but is suspended in their contact zone. However, he sees more of a positive potential in the spongy earth of the swamp with its images of decay than in the cultivated images of civilization: “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (176). The Final Frontier On the whole, the inherent potentialities of the swamp that fascinated Thoreau have been regarded as obstacles to progress and development. Especially in Florida, the swamp was seen as a major hindrance to settlement and progress, as a hazard to be drifted and drained if the region were to be finally “Somebody’s got to get angry…” 43 cultivated. With the Everglades its “king-size […] swamp” (Walsh 153), Florida occupies a special position in American environmental history “as the first state to be discovered and last to be developed” (Dovell 187), as the region where the natural surroundings posed - and still pose, albeit from a reversed perspective - a major challenge for a long period of time. “As late as 1897, four years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the western frontier closed,” Michael Grunwald notes, “an explorer marveled that the Everglades was still ‘as much known to the white man as the heart of Africa’” (Swamp 5). One traveler writing about the area in the 1930s is quoted as saying that there were still vast stretches of the marshlands “that remain[ed] unexplored, virgin territory - America’s last frontier” (Dovell 194, emphasis added). It was not until the 1940s that the drainage of the Everglades could be considered a ‘successful’ project, but it had also brought about the serious deterioration of the ecosystem. In 1947, writing in a period of extreme floods and extreme drought, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas began the last chapter of her famous The Everglades: River of Grass declaring, quite laconically, nature’s retreat in front of environmental mismanagement: “The Everglades were dying” (349). The Southern and Central Florida Project for Flood Control (C & SF), which was authorized in 1948, was no doubt designed to put an end to the “erratic cycle of deluge and drought” (Grunwald, Swamp 223); however, to some, the adverse effects of such efforts were quite predictable. Ernest Lyons, Florida based writer and conservationist, drew attention to the homocentric core and hubristic scope of the project: South Florida started out with a marvelous flood control plan. Nature designed it. It consisted of vast, perpetually inundated marshes and lakes interconnected by sloughs. It was a paradise for wildlife and, more practically, a sensible system of shallow reservoirs in which rainfall was stored to slowly seep into the ground. But being human we just couldn’t leave it alone […] Then when the rains came, we called on Government to take over and operate […] the magnificent system God had given us […] Now we are calling on Government to be the very God, by the creation of a huge artificial system […] Nature’s last frontiers of wildlife and last giant units for natural flood control would be destroyed. And Florida would be repeating the folly which conservationists have watched ruin rivers, make droughts and create floods across the nation! (Lyons quoted in Grunwald, Swamp 227-28) What sounds like the ultimate surrender of a unique biome to technocratic schemes of control was - if one were to trust Protagoras’s dictum “Man is the measure of all things” - an extremely slow death for it was only in 2000 that the ongoing “reanimation” project devised under the name of Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), the largest ecosystem restoration plan to date, was approved and initiated “to restore, protect and preserve the water resources in central and southern Florida.” On the whole, CERP aims at the large-scale modification of C & SF. The restoration process is expected to take another thirty years (“CERP”). L EYLA H AFERKAMP 44 In contemporary America, such projects as CERP seem to enjoy more publicity than before. Especially in the post-Katrina era, environmental consciousness seems to have shifted grounds once again as the ‘ecological threat’ has become an integral part of the MTV generation's ‘mainstream spectacle.’ As the ‘green mindset’ becomes increasingly more fashionable - if not, at least for some, almost a matter of etiquette - and eco-lifestyle, with the increasing demand for ‘green’ gadgets and ‘fair trade’ goods, finally finds its niche in the heart of American consumer culture, it is as if the interest in the ‘ornamentalization’ of nature were soon to outshine the interest in its instrumentalization. In fact, within the current discourse of popular ecology that is partly rooted in ‘middle-class morality,’ such trendy buzzwords as ‘sustainability’ are too readily embraced while the whole range of environmental problems seems to have been hastily downsized to the ‘inconvenient truth’ of global warming. Though climate change, as a doubtlessly anthropogenic phenomenon, does indeed pose an immense challenge to the biosphere as we know it, the frequent use and haphazard contextualization of the phrase in the mass media contributes less to a fruitful debate that addresses nature’s intrinsic value than to the psychodramatic process of soothing our ‘bourgeois conscience.’ To counter this extremely homocentric and trivializing tendency, it seems crucial to expand the ecological discourse beyond the bounds of the constant oscillation between technocratic faith in effective planning and outright pathetic fallacy. As Gregory Bateson has noted, the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pat to 'sell' the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight. (513) “Nature of the Beast” For the Florida based journalist and crime writer Carl Hiaasen, such “superficial ad hominem arguments” constitute the core of the mindset that he has been criticizing for decades. With a site-specific focus set on his native Florida and from his unique position in the intersection of popular culture and (eco)political activism, Hiaasen has been tackling environmental issues with “ferocity and passion, mordant wit, and moral outrage” (Stevenson xvi), both in his bestselling novels and in his biweekly column in the Miami Herald. While Hiaasen’s columns “often concern politics, corruption, and the environment - in Florida three closely related topics” (xix), his fiction, the scope of which comprises fourteen environmental thrillers (three of them coauthored with Bill Montalbano) and three children’s books - transports the very same topics into a fictional universe driven by dark satire. With its strain of radical environmentalism verging on ecoterrorism, Hiaasen’s fiction “Somebody’s got to get angry…” 45 pretty much defies the principle of political correctness as it displays an affinity towards ‘extreme statements.’ Even in Hiaasen’s children’s books Hoot (2002), Flush (2005) and Scat (2009), eco-resistance is performed frequently in the form of sabotage, an acceptable and efficient means with his juvenile protagonists. Other protagonists, e.g., Joe Winder in Native Tongue (1987), Spike Twilly in Sick Puppy (2000) and Ted Stranahan in Skinny Dip (2004), never shun acts of ‘violence against property,’ as long as these acts are performed for the sake of defending the Floridian landscape and wildlife against sheer profit-making. At times, eco-resistance is taken to the extreme when Hiaasen’s heroes reciprocate acts of ecocide with acts of homicide. Especially in the case of the recurring character Clinton Tyree aka Skink, who has appeared in five of the novels, this tendency is extremely accentuated. Both in his columns and in his novels, Hiaasen’s rhetorical vehemence and satirical wit are straightforward reactions against the despoiling of Florida, a continuous process he has had to witness since childhood, as his place of birth Plantation, once a tiny suburb “safely fringed by Everglades and swamp” (Stevenson xiv), has gradually mutated into a specimen of ‘Florida Frenzy,’ turning into the epitome of cancerous, ecocidal (sub)urban growth fuelled by greed and corruption: “The dirt bike-path Hiaasen and his friends rode into the swamp, where they camped and caught water moccasins, is now University Drive, nine shopping malls lining the same route they once took” (op.cit. xv). In the novel Native Tongue, it is the protagonist Joe Winder who is confronted with a similar scene of desolation. Upon visiting the “secret spot” of his childhood in southern Florida, Winder has to come to terms with the fact that the woods were gone. The buttonwoods, the mahogany, the gumbo-limbos - all obliterated. So were the mangroves. […] It looked as if a twenty megaton-bomb had gone off. Bulldozers had piled the dead tree at mountainous tangles at each corner of the property. (97) In Hiaasen’s novels, such scenes are no exception: pollution, overpopulation, exploitative tourism and the notorious real-estate mania lead to the depredation of the natural environment, while greed and corruption serve as catalysts that speed up the process. South Florida, “where many judges were linked by conspiracy or simple inbreeding to the crookedest politicians” (31) and “just about any dirtbag would blend in smoothly with the existing riffraff” (39), is depicted as replete with moral failures on both legal and political levels. In this gloomy tableau, especially Disney World, Florida’s number-one tourist attraction and located near the headwaters of the Everglades, figures as the monstrous compound epitome of ecological negligence, avarice and corruption in the area. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, a nonfiction account of the Disney Corporation, opens in New York City, with Hiaasen appalled by the new face of Times Square that is dominated, among L EYLA H AFERKAMP 46 other mainstream temples, by the Disney Store. In the artificial setting surrounding him, he seems to find the sole safe haven in the seedy, swampy interior of the nearby Peep Land, “hang[ing] on by cum-crusted fingernails” (8). The untamable seediness of Peep Land belongs to the few phenomena that resist instant co-option by the new dominant ‘culture’ around Times Square: [T]here’s a creepy comfort to be found amidst the donkey films and giant rubber dicks, a subversive triumph at unearthing such slag so near to Disney’s golden portals. (Hey, Mickey, whistle on this! ) Peep Land is important precisely because it’s so irredeemable and because it cannot be transformed into anything but what it is. Slapping Disney’s name on a joint like this would not elevate or enrich it even microscopically, or cause it to be taken for a shrine. Standing in Disney’s path, Peep Land remains a gummy little cell of resistance. And resistance is called for. (9) One could, of course, argue that Peep Land’s seediness is most liable to work in favor of Disney, emphasizing the cleanliness of the family-friendly Disney universe. However, one could also argue that Peep Land’s in-your-face obscenity points towards a latent, yet more potent obscenity that is none other than Disney itself. Native Tongue, whose plot revolves around the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a less sophisticated imaginary replica of Disney World, transports this obscenity into fiction, to a Florida, where “the prospect of a theme park to compete with Disney World carried an orgasmic musk to local chambers of commerce” (Native Tongue 32). The Amazing Kingdom is not only “a tourist trap, plain and simple” that brings “traffic, garbage, litter, air pollution” (83) to the area, but also the very embodiment of the hypocritical strategies employed in the real world by “[t]he Mouse’s sprawling selfcontained empire” (32). One of these double-dealing strategies concerns the co-option of conservation efforts into profit making schemes: imitating Disney’s project to save “the dusky seaside sparrow, a small marsh bird whose habitat was being wiped out by overdevelopment along Florida’s coastline” (15), the Amazing Kingdom engages in fake efforts to save Vance and Violet, the last surviving specimens of the “blue-tongued mango vole,” Hiaasen’s fictitious “Microtus mango” (16). Despite the fact that the Amazing Kingdom has contributed substantially to the destruction of the endangered species’ habitat, “the Vole Project” attracts much publicity and praise, even from the Florida Audubon Society, as “a shining example of private enterprise using its vast financial resources to save a small but precious resource of nature” (50). As is often the case in Hiaasen’s crime fiction, such blatant, unabashed hypocrisy is enough to enrage the ecologically minded: “resistance is called for” (Team Rodent 9). In this bizarre and farcical universe displaying, at first sight, solely black and white distinctions, the ‘good guys’ collaborate to fight back against sleazy developers, corrupt politicians and immoral scientists and thwart their notorious plans. Whereas the former group consists, for the most part, of “Somebody’s got to get angry…” 47 devoted environmentalists turned violent ecoteurs, those belonging to the latter are characterized primarily by their lack of respect for nature’s inherent value. Chaz Perrone, the chief antagonist in Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip, for instance, is a corrupt biologist attracted by immoral schemes for “[n]othing about nature awed, soothed or humbled him - not the solitude or the mythic vastness or the primordial ebb and flow” (75). In Native Tongue, with the Amazing Kingdom finally burned down to ashes and the property it stood on “replanted with native trees, including buttonwoods, pigeon plums, torchwoods, brittle palms, tamarinds, gumbolimbos and mangroves” (325), the ecoteurs succeed in accomplishing their mission of restoring the ‘order of nature.’ In this novel, Hiaasen’s activists form an eclectic group of eccentrics one would expect to find in a comic strip: Joe Winder, a prize-winning former investigative journalist turned publicist for the Amazing Kingdom, whose looks vary from “a Navajo nightmare” (13) to “one of the Manson family” (61), Molly McNamara, “a seventy-year-old woman in pink curlers” (19) matching “her reading glasses with the pink roses on the frames” (66) and the founder of The Mothers of Wilderness, which, “[o]f all environmental groups fighting to preserve what little remained of Florida, […] are regarded as the most radical and shrill and intractable” (31), sensitive small-time crooks Danny Pogue and Bud Schwartz, hired by the Mothers to kidnap the mango voles under the guise of the Wildlife Rescue Corps, and the Trooper Jim Tile, who is depicted as “very tall and very muscular and very black” (78). On the whole, Hiaasen resembles Elmore Leonard on an environmental mission, crossed with the more mainstream and less scatological version of John Waters. In fact, much like Beverly Suthpin in Waters’s Serial Mom, the seemingly poised character who will go to extremes for what she thinks is right and even kill one of her jurors for the mere stylish faux pas of wearing white shoes after Labor Day, Hiaasen’s fictional characters will not shy away from acts of extreme violence to punish random strangers for discarding litter onto the highway, or for even simply being “tourons” (Hiaasen’s portmanteau coinage for a tourist). Importantly, both in his columns and in his darkly satirical crime fiction, “where the underlying crime […] is the murder of South Florida” (Grunwald, “Swamp Things”), Hiaasen treats instrumentalizing schemes and anthropomorphizing tendencies directed against nature not merely as signals of homocentric inclinations; in both cases, such tendencies simply form the ‘axis of evil.’ As Diane Stevenson notes, “[g]reed and its accompanying corruption […] occupy one side of Hiaasen’s clearly articulated system of right and wrong, while unspoiled wilderness lies on the other” (xv, emphasis added). While, on the whole, Hiaasen’s stock of characters seems to be evenly distributed according to this clear-cut binary opposition, it is Skink who inhabits the boundary zone between the two sides. When Skink first appears in Double Whammy, it is simply by pointing to a levee separating so-called civilization from an untouched stretch of the Everglades that he sets the moral tenor L EYLA H AFERKAMP 48 prevailing in Hiaasen’s fiction: “This dike is like the moral seam of the universe […] Evil on the one side, good on the other” (281). 1 The idealistic ex-governor turned ‘wild’ hermit is a disillusioned ecologically minded politician, who has walked out on his office, never to come back. Engaging occasionally in acts of outright ecoterrorism for his love of Florida, Skink is probably the most controversial figure in Hiaasen’s novels. The ex-governor is, at first sight, All-American: He was everything the voters craved: tall, ruggedly handsome, an ex-college football star (second-team All-American lineman), a decorated Vietnam veteran (a sniper once lost for sixteen days behind enemy lines with no food or ammunition), an eligible bachelor, an avid outdoorsman. (92) On the one hand, these traits are laced with charisma and the intellectual candor of a true bibliophile. In Double Whammy, his hermitage is a book-lined lakeside shack; on display are classics, reference books, philosophy and the humanities and even children’s books (82). In later novels, when Skink lives in abandoned vehicles and even a dumpster, there is still always room for his library. In his retreat in Native Tongue, for instance, he has an old Plymouth full of books, including “Churchill, Hesse, Sandburg, Steinbeck, Camus, Paine, Wilde, Vonnegut, de Tocqueville, Salinger, García Márquez, even Harry Crews” (150). Despite this air of refinement, however, there exists another side to his character that seems diametrically opposed to the cultivated persona: “Skink’s size, apparel, and maniacal demeanor did not invite heroic confrontation at thirty thousand feet” (Double Whammy 113). At the end of Skinny Dip, he is last seen as the ‘crazed wanderer’ quoting laconically Tennyson’s famous line “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (355) while he accompanies Chaz Perrone to his final destination in the uncharted recesses of the Everglades. As the evildoers’ nemesis, Skink embodies the revenge of exploited nature; it is as if he had absorbed the ‘terror’ inflicted upon nature by materialistic culture into his own to use it for retributive punishment. In Native Tongue, he enters the scene accompanied by “a great turmoil erupt[ing] around the truck,” (72) with “[a] silvery beard of biblical proportions. Mismatched eyes: one as green as mountain pines, the other brown and dead. Above that a halo of pink flowers” (73). 1 This strict separation of good from evil stands, no doubt, in the way of objectivity. In his review of Skinny Dip, the novel in which the antagonist is a corrupt scientist involved in the restoration of the Everglades, Grunwald has criticized Hiaasen for distorting reality and disregarding the merits of a project like CERP for the sake of his black and white depiction of Florida (see “Swamp Things”). Though his claim may be true, what Grunwald does not take into account is the fact that Hiaasen’s satirical fiction is not the suitable forum for praising technocratic decision-making and underlining the benefits of a megaproject that nicely resonates with the megaproject of soothing our conscience. Hiaasen directs his readers’ attention to an aspect that receives much less publicity than CERP: nature’s intrinsic value. If, along this path, he has been disregarding the “good sides” to an important restoration project, he certainly has every poetic license to do so. “Somebody’s got to get angry…” 49 Clinton Tyree is simultaneously the personification of the Floridian wild(er)ness, especially of the Everglades, and, as the theriomorphic figure wearing the radio collar he has taken off a dead panther, its “indicator species.” While he engages even in the fiercest acts of violence to retaliate the unjust treatment of the natural world, it is as if the Everglades had imposed upon him the existence of a hybrid in which the animal and the human are no longer discernible. In Skink, the cultivated human being is transformed into a homo ferus that has assumed diverse traits of wildlife: the reptile his self-ascribed nickname refers to, the scavenger he becomes when he lives off road kill, and the panther he is detected as on the radar of the wildlife controllers all contribute to his ‘wildness.’ Much like Thoreau, Skink resides in the contact zone marked out by civilization on the one hand and the ideal of pristine nature on the other. His mode of ‘civil disobedience,’ however, differs from Thoreau’s in that it is an explosive blend of intricate strategy and unbridled violence. Skink is, in Hiaasen’s own words, his ‘borderline’ (super)hero, who shuns not even coldblooded murder to avenge crimes against nature. Half Swamp Thing, half Thoreauvian moss trooper, the return of both of the ‘vanishing American’ and of the Unabomber, Skink resides in the interzone between nature and culture, embodies the hybrid between human and animal, while he also challenges the blurred distinction between sanity and insanity. On the whole, Hiaasen’s take on terrorism seems full of provocative cynicism. Not unlike the voices that interpreted the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11 as ‘Fortress America getting a dose of its own medicine,’ Hiaasen argues in an interview conducted by Steve Kroft of CBS News that there is hardly anything surprising about the fact that the terrorists had trained for their suicide missions in his native Florida: Unfortunately, the craziness of Florida provides a certain anonymity to all sorts of wackos, even terrorists. […] And I always tell people, ‘You think that was an accident? Where's the one place in the United States where the bar of bad behavior is so high that nobody’s gonna notice these guys? ’ Nobody's gonna think twice when they walk into a flight school and say, ‘I’d like to get on a 757 simulator, but I don't need the part about where you land it. Just teach me how to fly it around.’ And pay it in cash, and they say, ‘Oh, right this way, Mr. Atta. Sit over here.’ (Leung 3) It is, however, by no means solely due to cynicism that ecoterrorism constitutes one of the major strains in Hiaasen’s writing. Ecoterrorism serves to shed light on the ‘real’ sources of ecoterror in Florida, i.e. on the crimes committed against nature in the name of development and progress. Here, the truism ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’ becomes almost a motto. For those who believe that crimes against nature constitute the ‘real’ acts of ecoterror, what the authorities regard as acts of ecoterrorism are simply cases of ecodefense. 2 This is a commonality Hiaasen’s 2 A parallel can be drawn, in real life, to the story of the 23-year-old Caltech student William Jensen Cottrell. Cottrell was convicted of conspiracy to arson of eight sport utility L EYLA H AFERKAMP 50 fiction shares with Edward Abbey, who has coined the term “monkeywrenching” as a form of “resistance against the destruction of natural diversity and wilderness” (Foreman 9) and whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) has been instrumental in integrating active eco-resistance into the fictional realm. In the foreword to Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, a book published by EarthFirst! , Abbey, argues as follows: Representative government in the USA represents money not people and therefore has forfeited our allegiance and moral support […] Such is the nature and structure of the industrial megamachine (in Lewis Mumford’s term) which is now attacking the American wilderness. That wilderness is our ancestral home, the primordial homeland of all living creatures including the human […] And if the wilderness is our true home, if it is threatened by invasion, pillage and destruction - as it certainly is - then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private rooms, by whatever means are necessary. (4-5, emphasis added) Unsurprisingly, Hiaasen’s recent children’s book Scat contains an explicit reference to Abbey: “Ed was sort of a bomb thrower, only the bombs were ideals and principles. He liked the earth more than he liked most humans” (146); the one who introduces Scat’s teenage protagonist to the writings of ‘the desert anarchist’ is none other than Twilly Spree, another recurring character, millionaire ecoteur and Skink’s collaborator in Sick Puppy. Skink is not only the embodiment of ecodefense “by whatever means necessary” against profit-oriented (and at times state-induced) ecoterror, but also the epitome of wildness in the Thoreauvian sense, which is, in Lawrence Buell’s words, “an antidote to hypercivilization” (149). From the homocentric perspective, his brutal ‘wildness’ surely has the pejorative connotations of mental derangement. However, his wildness reaches beyond the scope of homocentric concerns, for it is, to quote Buell once more, “a quality humans share with non-human entities” (149). With the non-human aspect of his character underscored by his theoriomorphic transformation, by his taking on, quite symptomatically, the ‘official’ identity of a panther, Skink’s metamorphosis suggests the reversal of Disney’s anthropomorphic take on the animal world. It is precisely this process of ‘becoming animal’ that attributes ex-governor Clinton Tyree what Thoreau calls “a wildness no civilization can endure, - as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw” (175). Importantly, Skink’s brutality is not inhuman but rather non-human, his terrorism a consequence of his ‘animal nature.’ Oddly enough, Understanding Terrorism, a recent publication on terrorism, opens with a chapter on the definitions of terrorism that is entitled, albeit metaphorically, “The Nature of the Beast” (see Martin). vehicles and a Hummer dealership in the name of the Earth Liberation Front in April 2005 and was sentenced to eight years in jail on ‘terrorism’ charges. Suffice to note that, according to the FBI affidavit, Cottrell is known to have sent an e-mail to another Caltech student a few weeks prior to the attacks which contained information about his plans to acquire money for 5,000 bumper stickers that said “My SUV supports terrorism” (Rosenzweig). “Somebody’s got to get angry…” 51 Hiaasen’s use of theriomorphic representation calls forth two literary traditions, both intermingled, in his fiction, with the elements of the hardboiled genre. First, Hiaasen makes extensive use of satire. His prose is replete with trenchant wit, irony and sarcasm, which he uses to expose and discredit all that he regards as vice or folly. The stylistic device prevailing in his fiction is, quite predictably, that of extreme hyperbole. Along these lines, his answer to the prevailing homocentric tendency surrounding him is the use of heightened theriomorphism that is not only embodied in Skink, but also lends the character its specific contours as a figure suspended in the interzone between culture and nature. Second, Hiaasen counters the gloomy reality of the Sunshine State with an unrelenting naturalism. He seems to aim at the ideal of what the naturalist Frank Norris had called “the ‘nature’ revival in literature; ” in fact, in keeping with Norris’s phrasing, one could argue that Hiaasen’s novels fit into the category of “novels with a purpose. Again, as Norris noted nearly a century before him, the project is “all about [the] return to nature, this unerring groping backward toward the fundamentals, in order to take a renewed grip upon life” (141). Norris’s naturalistic dictum that “[L]ife is better than ‘literature’ even if the literature be of human beings and the life be that of a faithful dog” (142) also holds for Hiaasen. 3 Ecoterrorism in Hiaasen’s satirical universe reflects the violent “nature of the beast,” as part of an extreme statement that resists co-option by the dominant code. As Skink tells Twilly Spree in Sick Puppy: Son, I can't tell you what to do with your life - hell, you've seen what I've done with mine. But I will tell you there's probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody's got to get angry or nothing gets fixed. That's what we were put here for, to stay pissed off. (304) In Hiaasen’s work, ecoterrorism as ecodefense reaches beyond the bounds of the discursive notion of political correctness; it reflects the naturalism of the swamp, which is - to quote Erich von Stroheim’s cine-novel Poto-Poto - the realm of uncultivated instincts and unmediated impulse: “Here, the latitude is zero […] Here […] no tradition, no precedent […] Here […] each acts according to the impulse of the moment […] and does what Poto-Poto impels him to do […] Poto-Poto is our only law […]” (qtd. in Deleuze 130). Such is the nature of the swamp and Hiaasen’s terrorists come with the territory. 3 In the darkly humorous Sick Puppy, as it were written according to Norris’s dictum, the life of a dog turns out to be the protagonists’ main concern. L EYLA H AFERKAMP 52 Works Cited Abbey, Edward. “Forward! ” Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Ed. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood. Chico: Abbzug Press, 1993. 3-4. ---. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon, 1975. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2000. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. “Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP)” 14 Mar. 2010 <http: / / www. evergladesplan.org/ index.aspx>. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum, 2005. Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. The Everglades: River of Grass. Cinema 1: The Movement- Image. Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 2007. Dovell, Junius E. “The Everglades, a Florida Frontier” Agricultural History 22.3 (1948): 187-97. Foreman, Dave. “Strategic Monkeywrenching.” Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Ed. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood. Chico: Abbzug Press, 1993. 5-11. Grunwald, Michael. “Swamp Things. ” The New Republic Online (11 Nov 2004): 27 Mar. 2009 < http: / / www.powells.com/ review/ 2004_11_11.html >. ---. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. Hiaasen, Carl. Double Whammy. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987. ---. Flush. New York: Yearling, 2005. ---. Hoot. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. ---. Native Tongue. London: Macmillan, 1992. ---. Sick Puppy. London: Macmillan, 2000. ---. Skinny Dip. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. ---. Scat. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ---. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. New York: Random House, 1998. Leung, Rebecca. “Florida: ‘A Paradise of Scandals.’” CBS News: 60 Minutes (4 Jun 2006): 3 pp. 6 June 2010 <http: / / www.cbsnews.com/ stories/ 2005/ 04/ 15/ 60 minutes/ main688458.shtml>. Martin, Gus. Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Norris, Frank. The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays. 1903. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. Pratt, Mary Louise. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008. Rosenzweig, David. “Man Indicted in Attacks on SUV Dealers.” Los Angeles Times (18 Mar. 2004): 27 Mar. 2009 <http: / / articles.latimes.com/ 2004/ mar/ 18/ local/ meeco18>. Serial Mom. Dir. John Waters. Polar Entertainment, 1994. Stevenson, Diane. “Introduction.” Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen. Ed. Diane Stevenson. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999. xiv-xxiv. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” 1862. The Major Essays of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Richard Dillman. Albany: Whitston Publishing Company, 2001. 161-189. Walsh, Moira. “Wind Across the Everglades.” Catholic World 188.1123/ 1128 (1958): 153. II. Transcultural Networks and the Media G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age The history of culture and urbanity is largely a history of networks. Since ancient times urban settlements acted as hubs for the exchange of goods and news, genes and memes. However, cities not only thrived as privileged parts of regional, wide area and even global networks. While growing larger and larger they also developed their own sophisticated networks within their walls, material ones such as water systems and sewerages as well as immaterial ones like the ever-shifting webs of economic, social, cultural and sexual relationships. In principle, two sets of networks important to human culture and specifically city life can be differentiated: biological and cultural networks, i.e., networks of life and networks of transportation and communication. The former ones came into existence billions of years ago when molecules began to form “the chemical circuitry of life. Unicellular creatures appeared: enclosed molecular networks that merged into bigger networks called organisms, which collaborated to form ecosystems and societies of primates that now call themselves humans” (Johnson). Besides consisting of networked molecules, all life forms are also part of socio-biological networks, particularly of sexual contact and of disease. This constant biological interchange is furthered by the second set of culturally produced networks that sprang up in response to the needs of early humanoids. As water and food or materials for clothing and weapons were not always located where it was safe or comfortable to live, organizing long-distance transport and communication became essential for survival. From the first water systems to the electric grid, from the famous Roman cursus publicus to modern freeway systems, from the network spanning what was then the known world that supplied wild animals to the Roman Coliseum to the national and international TV networks of the 20 th century: each culture - and namely life in its cities - is to a great extent defined by the contemporary state of networking technologies and by the way societies make use of available technologies. As important as these biological and cultural networks were, they stayed for thousands of years - like the air that we breathe - mostly invisible to human perception and reflection. In antiquity and the middle ages, there was little effort to observe and analyze the multitude of networking activities. Only in modern times was their defining role in human culture slowly recognized. The first mathematical theory of networks - the Graph Theory G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 56 (1736) - was developed during the Enlightenment. In the industrial age it was adapted - with the Random Graph Theory (1959) - to explain more complex industrial networks like the phone system. However, only recently, when scientists gained access to the huge amounts of information that digital networks provide, did network theory advance - with the Small World Theory (1998) and the Theory of Scale-Free Networks (1999) - far enough to finally be able to explain many of the biological and cultural networks that are defining our existence. Indeed, modern network science claims to have found “a common blueprint” for networks as dissimilar as food webs and the network of molecules in a living cell, the network of language and the World Wide Web, economic systems and the network of neurons in the human brain. “We have come to see that we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else” (Barabasi 6-7). In this essay, however, I concern myself not with these theories of networking per se but with the question of how networks of transportation and communication over time shaped urban everyday life as well as the arts flourishing in these cities. I will argue that today, in the early days of the digital age, we are experiencing the continuation of technological as well as cultural processes that started in the Renaissance with mechanization and later escalated in the Enlightenment with industrialization. The vanishing point of my historical investigation is therefore the radical change of urban life driven by the implementation of digital networking technologies: the emergence of a hybrid - partly material, partly virtual - everyday life in the city. Analyzing the strong relationship between urbanity and networking in the technological phases of modern times - mechanical, industrial, digital -, I will proceed in five steps. First, I outline the dominant networking technologies of each period. Second, I describe the prevalent practices of communication, third the prevalent practices of audiovisual production demonstrating the strong interchange between technologies of networking and the principles of narration, that is, between city life and how it is told - or rather: how it can be audio-visually represented. Fourth, I look into the perception and reflection of prevalent networking practices by their contemporaries, and fifth I analyze the consequences of these technological and cultural conditions for the advance of differently structured public spheres in the mechanical, industrial and digital ages. In the final chapter of my essay, I will then try to extend this history of networks and city life into the near future by identifying dominant forces and tendencies that seem to drive further change. 1 Cities and Life in the Age of Mechanical Networks What we are used to calling the Renaissance was initiated by the coming together of the - in Christian Europe almost forgotten - knowledge of the antiquity, which was the theoretical knowledge of philosophers and scien- Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 57 tists, with the knowledge of the Middle Ages, which was the practical knowledge of craftsmen. 1 One of the results of this knowledge revolution was the development of mechanical technology based on mathematics - from the invention of the compass that changed sea travel to the invention of scaffolding that changed architecture, from the invention of perspective painting to the most powerful invention of all: the printing press. This rise of mechanical technology gave rise as well to a new class that developed and used these advanced means and techniques to their economic advantage: craftsmen, engineers and architects, merchants, traders and bankers, academics, scientists and artists. They all, of course, lived and worked in towns, which grew to become centers of commerce and communication, manufacturing and the arts. Slowly the medieval town gave way to a more secular and enlightened city shaped by the process of mechanization and its social and cultural consequences. New networks of transportation and communication connecting the prospering cities of early modern times sprang up. The book trade, for example, soon rivaled the widespread communications network of the Catholic Church in cultural influence. In both cases, physical storage devices - letters, books - had to be transported. The defining element of these and all other networks of the mechanical age therefore was that news could only travel as quickly as goods. With the rare exception of smoke signals, beacons or reflected light, there was - in stark contrast to the industrial and the digital age - basically no communication without transportation. Following the popular numbering scheme for software, we can call those practices for the distribution of goods or news that require physical movement driven by biological or at least natural energy Networking 1.0. Its central principle is the identity of transportation and communication, its most important technique the material bridging of geographic distances by covering the space in between. In the mechanical civilization that developed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment technology limited the range of transportation. Some long-distance networks covering sea and land developed as well, particularly in the context of the discovery of the New World. The average distribution of goods and media, however, happened within and around cities and between neighboring cities. Insofar as covering the space that separated the sender and the receiver of a message was the central technique in mechanical networking, bridges became one of its foremost technical achievements. By closing geographical gaps, they create the physical continuum between nodes that is needed to establish a mechanical network. Not surprisingly, the bridge soon turned into a mythical place, a space of existential transition whose construction and destruction, loss and conquest came to symbolize the triumphs, dangers and pitfalls of transportation and communication in the 1 My rendering of the process of mechanization and its cultural consequences follows Giedion, Habermas, Hauser, McLuhan (1962 & 1965), Panofsky, Romano and Tenenti. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 58 mechanical age. 2 Crossing a bridge was risky on principle because its surface was always covering something up, be it an abyss, a raging river or enemies hiding. In that respect, bridges came to stand for the perils and shortcomings of mechanical networking itself: the arduous effort of bridging geographical distances that is critical for every successful act of physical transportation. A famous anecdote about the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe illustrates how ‘covering’ was the basic principle of mechanical networking. Crossing the Alps when traveling from Germany to Italy, Goethe - like the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann before him - allegedly kept the curtains of his carriage closed in order to spare himself the sight of the vast, tiresome and potentially dangerous expanse. One could say that by successfully bridging or covering visually the distance between several nodes in a contemporary network of transportation, Goethe sitting in the dark room of his carriage was treating himself like goods in a parcel or a letter in an envelope which are covered up for protection during transport and will only be opened once they have safely arrived. The significance of this anecdote, however, reaches further. The drama being the main audiovisual medium of the mechanical age and Goethe being an experienced dramatist, he was all too familiar with the aesthetic function of curtains. He didn’t just wrap himself up like a parcel; he directed his travel experience after the model of a stage play. Hence Goethe’s action points towards an important interrelation between networking and the audiovisual arts: all networking has to cope with time and space constraints as does all audiovisual story telling. At any given historical time, that is, at any given level of technological development, the techniques of networking and the techniques of storytelling deal with time and space in a very similar way as both have to rely on what is available to them to solve their time-space-problems. Simply put: the theater curtain, particularly on the proscenium stage, functions very much like a bridge ‘covering’ gaps of space - and time. 3 The significance of this observation becomes clearer once one compares - as I will do in the following chapters - this mechanical bridging of space and time on the stage with the industrial control of space and time in linear audio visions or later the digital control of space and time in nonlinear audio visions. Considering the important technological and cultural role of bridges in transportation and communication during the mechanical age, it does not come as a surprise that the first theory of networking concerned itself with 2 Most famously in 20 th century novels like Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) or Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and movies like David Lean‘s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (1959) or John Guillermin’s The Bridge at Remagen (1969). The International Movie Data Base (<www.imdb.com>) lists several hundred movies with the word ‘bridge’ in their title. 3 In this context we can think of the balcony - between Renaissance and Enlightenment in dramas a very popular setting - as a broken bridge that rather separates than unites the protagonists. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 59 their function for city life. In the early 18 th century, when Immanuel Kant, the foremost philosopher of German Enlightenment, was teaching in Königsberg, the citizens of this Baltic town engaged in a popular contest: who could find a way to walk through all parts of the city without crossing any bridge twice? Attacking the task by trial and error, nobody seemed clever enough to find a working solution. Then the mathematician Leonhard Euler approached the problem systematically. By thinking of each part of the town as a thing - in modern terms: an abstract vertex or node - and of each bridge as an action - in modern terms: an abstract connection or edge -, he created a mathematical structure called a graph that allows for the quantitative analysis of the interactions of nodes via edges. “Both Kant (in politics) and Euler (in mathematics) show how an adequate understanding of networks must not come from experience, but from an abstracting, spatializing procedure” (Thacker). Fig. 1: Graph of the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg.” 4 Euler’s mathematical reformulation enabled an epistemological shift. From the perspective of the user, who had to find the right solution to a problem that was thought of as in principle solvable, he turned to the perspective of the network, whose structure did or did not allow for certain uses. Implementing such a topological view in 1736 for the first time, Euler could not only prove that there was no solution to this particular problem - no way to walk through all parts of the city without crossing a bridge twice. 5 He also demonstrated in general the pivotal position of network design: its layout is the limit. Whoever controls the structure of a network controls its uses. In contradistinction to later developments in the industrial and digital age, however, the public sphere in the mechanical age evolved relatively unaffected by national or international networks of communication and their layout. Social and cultural exchange in the cities was dominated by face-toface contact on streets, in coffeehouses, salons, marketplaces or theater foy- 4 All graphics by Leon S. Freyermuth. 5 In the 19 th century, the citizens of Königsberg built an eighth bridge, making possible what is now called an Eulerian path (Barabasi 12). G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 60 ers, i.e., public places that offered equal access to at least the educated amongst the citizenry. Their communication was, to a large extent, not yet influenced and predetermined by (mass) media but consisted primarily of peer-to-peer discussions, sometimes instigated and furthered by (low distribution) media like pamphlets, journals, books and theater plays. The first main characteristic of the public sphere in the mechanical age therefore is that it was largely unmediated, the second that it was geographically fragmented and intellectually diverse with participants and topics of discussion varying from town to town. Consequently, in wide parts of Europe the educated few who participated in the public discourse considered themselves rather citizens of their town than citizens of a larger political entity (empire, kingdom, nation state). In some respects - prevalence of peer-to-peer communication, high level of fragmentation - the public sphere in these pre-industrial times was obviously closer to our emerging digital public sphere than to the mass mediated public that the looming industrial age would bring about. At least since the Enlightenment the contemporaries in the most developed regions, however, sought to overcome exactly these characteristics of pre-industrial culture, namely the limited scope of the public sphere and the limited reach of its media. They longed for national debates, national print media and national forms of entertainment (like a national theater). Of course, existing networking and media technologies could not fulfill most of these desires. Mechanical culture reached its limits. As Harold Innis put it: We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization. (Innis 34) 2 Cities and Life in the Age of Industrial Networks Industrialization was mainly driven by the combination of two innovations: the increased availability of ever more efficient non-biological energy sources (i.e., steam, gas, gasoline, electricity) and the mathematical analysis and control of work processes (i.e., Taylorization of human labor and automation of machine work). 6 Again the rise of new industrial technologies gave rise to new classes that developed and used these advanced industrial means and techniques to their economic advantage: entrepreneurs, managers and professionals, skilled and unskilled factory workers, engineers, technicians and mechanics, administrators and bureaucrats as well as a new breed of intellectuals, academics, scientists, journalists and artists that catered to the industri- 6 My rendering of the process of industrialization and its cultural consequences follows Giedion, Hauser, Landes, McLuhan (1962 & 1965), Mokyr, and Mumford. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 61 al masses and their growing need for information and entertainment. Cities grew larger and larger and a new metropolitan way of life evolved that was shaped by the process of industrialization and its social and cultural consequences. One of its main characteristics was anonymity, the fact that in their everyday life - walking the streets, using public transportation, shopping in department stores, attending theaters or movie theaters - the inhabitants of the industrial city experienced a seamless string of close encounters with total strangers. Graph theory, of course, could not describe or explain the extremely complex social and economic web in the metropolis, the different degrees of separation between hundreds of thousands of strangers, the series of chance meetings with “The Man of the Crowd.” Nor could it help to plan and manage the many new networks that came into existence during the 19 th and 20 th century. On the one hand, the application of industrial technology to transportation and communication dramatically accelerated and widened the reach of goods and news. With the extension of the rail network, the growth of national highway systems and finally air travel, commerce and communication accelerated and expanded. On the other hand, and much more importantly, a radically new category of networking came into existence. With the telegraph and the telephone, later with the radio and TV broadcasting, long-distance communication became independent from physical transport. The defining element of these new industrial networks of communication was that now news could indeed travel faster than goods. Actually, for the first time in human culture they could travel in real-time. In contrast to mechanical networking, these new industrial practices of networking which do not require physical movement for communication while at the same time speeding up the transport of goods through the use of non-biological energy, automation and industrial division of labor can be called Networking 2.0. Its central principle is the faculty to separate communication from transportation, and its most important technique in regard to communication is the elimination of geographic distances by switching between various material or immaterial connecting lines. In the industrial civilization that came into being between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, the distribution of goods and news in everyday life was no longer just local or regional, but national. International long-distance networks of transportation and communication were established as well over sea, land and in the air, particularly during the second half of the 20 th century. The average distribution of goods and media, however, still happened within nations and, to some extent, also between neighboring countries. Insofar as the central principle in industrial communications was the instant, realtime elimination of any space that separated the sender and the receiver of a message, one of the foremost technical achievements were practices of switching, namely the operator at the telephone exchange and later the circuit switch in telephony, as well as the techniques of link-up and switch over in radio and TV broadcasting. By interconnecting several shorter connections G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 62 to a new continuous line, switching achieves in industrial networks of communication what bridging achieves for mechanical (and industrial) networks of transportation: it creates the necessary physical continuum (edge) between two points (nodes). Although the operator or the circuit switch never became existential myths like the bridge, the practice of switching figures prominently in many mid-20 th century movies exploiting contemporary fears of intrusion and dangerous confrontations that mischievous connections by humans or faulty switches might produce. 7 In that respect the technical process of connecting symbolizes the perils and shortcomings of industrial networking itself: the somewhat uncontrollable effort of (re-) assembling various paths of communication that in the industrial age is a prerequisite for any successful act of non-physical long-distance communication. The strong affection that the movies and television always had for the telephone as a narrative ploy bringing together visually - in cross-cutting or even in split screens protagonists who are separated by space points one more time towards the important interrelation between the state of networking and the state of storytelling. Obviously, industrial networks of communication and film as the new audiovisual art form of the industrial age manipulate space and time in a very similar matter. Montage or editing accomplish in the movies what curtains provide in the theater: heightened control of space and time. While the curtain ‘covers’ spatial distance like a bridge or an envelope giving protection for the time consuming process of getting from place A to place B, the practices of editing - like switching in communications - manage to do away with the distance between place A and place B in no time. Geographic space is not covered anymore. It is switched away and cut out, erased, eliminated. While new national and international networks of transportation and communication experienced rapid growth during the 19 th and early 20 th century, there was no mathematical theory that could help with understanding (or planning) the expansion of complex and constantly changing networks such as the postal distribution system or the phone net, not to mention the web of social relations in an industrial metropolis or the dissemination of infectious diseases. Euler’s Graph Theory could be applied to uniform and essentially static or slow growth networks like systems of roads and bridges or rails where nodes have roughly the same amount of edges. But it could not, for example, model the highly dynamic phone net that allowed (or should allow) for arbitrary connections between all its millions of nodes. The need for a more advanced theory of networking was finally answered in 1959 when Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi published their paper “On Random Graphs.” It provided a model to understand the functioning of complex networks with huge numbers of nodes (Barabasi, 13-24; Buchanan, 34-40). The most surprising insight of the Random Graph Theory was how few randomly placed links are sufficient to close a network: 7 An outstanding example is Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 63 For a network of 300 points, there are nearly 50,000 possible links that could run between them. But if no more than about 2 percent of these are in place, the network will be completely connected. For 1,000 points, the crucial fraction is less than 1 percent. For 10 million points, it is only 0.000001. (Buchanan 37) Fig. 2: Random Graph. The Random Graph Theory, however, was based on three basic assumptions in the tradition of Graph Theory that dramatically limited its usefulness. First, it still didn’t account for growth or other forms of change though almost all known networks tend to change and definitely most contemporary industrial networks were growing fast. Second, it still worked with regular graphs or uniform networks in which links are pretty much equally distributed. But in many if not most real-world networks some nodes - so-called hubs - have many more links than others. In social webs, some people are very popular, in economic networks some companies attract more customers, in sexual networks some have more partners, in any language some words are used more often, in road, rail or airline networks some nodes (interchanges, stations, airports) incur more traffic than others, etc. Third, Random Graph Theory did not differentiate between the qualities of nodes; on the contrary, it presumed that all nodes were created equal as this was a prerequisite for random linking. But we know from our own experience that networking does not happen randomly, that it is rather controlled by interests and preferences. In everyday situations at least, we don’t become friends with just anybody, we don’t buy just anything, we don’t call random phone numbers, etc. Hubs and clustering and not random distribution therefore characterize many networks. While it took almost thirty years until these shortcomings were fully realized and overcome through scientific research, the idea of random linking - that our cultural networks have random structures - encountered opposition already in the 1960s and 1970s from other academic disciplines, namely philosophy, media theory, psychology, and sociology. These different approaches had in common that they all tried to understand the complexity of what at first sight appeared to be pure randomness. Marshall McLuhan, for example, G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 64 secularized Teilhard de Chardin’s religious concept of a “global brain” evolving from the increasingly complex and meaningful network of transportation and communication that, as he wrote, was enclosing our planet like “a new skin” (Teilhard 182). Declaring electricity the expansion of the human nervous system, 8 McLuhan took Chardin’s vision of an emerging global brain and transformed it into his media theorem of the emergence of a “global village”: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (McLuhan 1962, 32). Thanks to networks spanning the globe, he stated, every piece of information now reaches everybody instantly. 9 Only a few years later, the psychologist Stanley Milgram proved empirically that the post-industrial world was indeed a small world. Trying to measure the social “distance” between any two Americans, he set up a simple experiment. He sent letters to randomly selected people asking them to get this letter somehow to a person in a different state. Nobody was given the address of the recipient, just the city he lived in (Boston) and his job (stockbroker). The participants were not supposed to research the address but to “hand” it to someone they personally knew and of whom they assumed that he or she might be “closer” to that Boston stockbroker (Milgram). According to Random Graph Theory in a population that large it should have taken at least several hundred thousand, in the worst case several million handshakes - depending how you account for social clustering - before the letters reached their intended recipient (Buchanan 38-39). Milgram’s letters, however, needed dramatically less ‘handshakes’: The experiment proved that there are just “six degrees of separation” between each of us and at the same time it proved that Random Graph Theory could not sufficiently account for real-life networks. Though the result was empirically sound and could be reproduced over and over again, it seemed counterintuitive, if not implausible to the common sense of most contemporaries and their perception of ‘mass man’ and social anonymity in the public sphere. Everyday life in the industrial age had been increasingly shaped by mass media, in the second half of the 19 th century by the rise of nationally distributed newspapers and magazines, in the first half of the 20 th century by the movies and radio and then, of course, in the second half of the last century by the omnipresence of TV. Particularly the broadcast media had caused radical transformations. Face-to-face and peer-to-peer discourses once dominating the pre-industrial public sphere turned into mediated discourses by proxy; diverse local and regional public spheres were 8 “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (McLuhan 1965, 3). 9 Towards the end of the 20th century, Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a global brain as well as Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a global village became epistemological models for a new generation of (media) theorists trying to understand the cultural consequences of the exponential growth of digital networks; among others Russell, Stock, de Rosnay, Levy, Dyson. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 65 replaced by a unified national public consisting of few participants and many listeners and viewers. City life thereby changed dramatically. National events broadcast by ‘the networks’ as the big TV conglomerates were called permeated local affairs. Radio and even more TV programming started to govern the daily schedule, remote controlling the flow of traffic, the success of local entertainment offerings and the topics of private conversations as well as the few surviving unmediated public debates. With regard to the present culture wars between old and new media and the raging debate whether and how the internet should be controlled and regulated, it is important to stress that the history of broadcasting in the 20 th century provides several conspicuous illustrations for the pivotal position of network design. Particularly instructive is the conversion of the radio from an instrument for two-way-communication, as it was invented in the early 20 th century and as it was used for more than twenty years, into a much simpler device that could only receive (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray 233-235). That move in combination with political decisions on how to license the airwaves transformed radio amateurs who took part in a public discourse into a passive mass of listeners - the audience. 10 Arguably, analog radio technology would not have allowed for millions of ongoing peer-to-peer-conversations, but the history of radio demonstrates how networking practices can act as a double-edged sword. Industrial technology realized the enlightened hopes for a nationwide public, but the new national audience was not able to participate in the new mediated public sphere anymore. Broadcasting reached millions but muted them at the same time, turning former participants into passive consumers - a national public united in silence. In the second half of the 20 th century, however, discontent with passive media consumption was growing. At the end of the mechanical age, more and more contemporaries had been longing for change, specifically for a public sphere of a wider than local reach. Now, at the end of the industrial age, more and more contemporaries were longing for change as well, specifically for a public sphere that allowed - again - for individual participation. What started with art installations that required audience interaction, avantgarde theater experiments like The Living Theater and underground practices like happenings, soon reached popular mass media itself. Television broadcasters realized that the audience was demanding more involvement; they developed already in the 1960s several strategies to compensate for the lack of a feedback channel in their analog networks - from proxy participation of the studio audience to experiments with the telephone as remedial medium (individuals participating in shows via phone, mass audience vote, etc.). But existing networking and industrial media technologies could hardly fulfill the growing desire for more participation and interaction. Industrial culture slowly approached its limits. 10 See Brecht and Enzensberger. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 66 3 Cities and Life in the Age of Digital Networks The technological foundation of digital culture was established around the middle of the 20 th century when in 1945 John von Neumann conceived of the virtualization of tools and machines (programs) and Claude Elwood Shannon in 1948 propelled the virtualization of materials, storage media and their content (files). 11 In theory, the separation of hardand software was accomplished then, though it would take several decades before digital technology was powerful and user friendly enough to become part of everyday life. Again, for the third time in modern history, the development of a new technology gave rise to a new class of professionals who developed and used the new means and techniques to their economic advantage: IT entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, hardware engineers and software programmers, system administrators and webmasters, network and satellite technicians, specialists for IT-support or e-commerce, CGI-animators, CADand video game designers, scientists working in new fields like robotics, genetics, superconductivity or nanotechnology and, of course, intellectuals and academics who study and analyze the socio-cultural effects of the epochal transition from an industrial to a digital civilization. For this new class, Peter F. Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers,” Robert Reich spoke of “symbolic analysts,” and Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein of a “virtual class” whose members are “dependent for their economic support on the drive to virtualization” (Drucker 6, Reich 181, Kroker and Weinstein 15). Since the late 1990s, city life has undergone constant change, not so much by the diffusion of digital technology itself - the entrance of networked computers and their software into workplaces and homes - but by mobile digital networking. First with cellular phones, then with the succession of mobile Von Neumann machines such as laptops, PDAs and GPS navigators, smart phones, net books and networked tablets, a mobile information infrastructure evolved, overlaying the analog reality. During the 19 th and 20 th century cities had, in direct response to the anonymity of everyday life and the fact that most of its enormous urban space stayed unfamiliar even to its long time inhabitants, built up their own communications infrastructure - street signs, house numbers, signposts, traffic signs, billboards, traffic control systems, etc. By these means, locals as well as strangers could partially “read” and navigate the industrial city. As long as the information was conveyed in analog form, however, it had to be more or less standardized. Everybody, for example, passing by an intersection had to read that a certain direction lead to downtown though he or she was trying to find their way to a friend’s house around the corner. And everybody looking at a billboard was offered, perhaps, diapers though their kids were teenagers by now. At the turn of the 11 Neumann, Shannon. - My rendering of the process of digitalization and its cultural consequences follows Abbate, Campbell and Aspray, Castells, Freyermuth, Friedewald, Levinson, Shurkin, Waldrop. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 67 21 st century, mobile digital broadband networking in combination with the proliferation of networked mobile communicators started to personalize the information and, of course, the entertainment that individuals could receive while navigating the city. The consequences were manifold. For one, the urban space, in the mechanical age to a large extent part of the public sphere and in the industrial age mostly an anonymous space of transition, suddenly became privatized. Today, on the sidewalks, in public transportation or in restaurants private affairs are openly discussed, though most of the time not with those physically present, and personally selected entertainment - music, movies, games - can be enjoyed as before only in the privacy of one’s own home. However, something else, the unique characteristic of digital networking, had an even stronger impact on city life and the public sphere: that it allows for peer-to-peer interaction. This ability is, of course, an effect of the basic principle of digitalization: the separation of hardand software, i.e., the replacement of hardware tools, machinery, materials and artifacts by software programs and software files. Consequently, while industrial networking uses hardware switching, digital networking replaces the hardware switch as well as the analog transmission of analog information with software. The central process of letting packets of data, consisting of some bits of information as well as navigational instructions, find their own way from place A to place B - so-called packet switching - was conceptualized already in the early 1960s and first tested in 1969 with the Arpanet (see Baran, Kleinrock, Abbate). Comparing this procedure to, for example, the analog transmission of a phone conversation illustrates the radical difference. First, the analog phone system can only transmit sound; digital packet switching on the other hand does not differentiate between media. It is by definition transmedial as software packets are no different whether they transport parts of an oral conversation or a letter, of a book or a movie. Therefore digital networks of communication can double as networks of transportation, at least for virtualized media, goods and services. In that respect, we have come full circle since the mechanical age: from the analog unity of transportation and communication to the digital unity of communication and transportation. Secondly, and more importantly, hardware-switched lines eliminating the space between place A und place B are, for the duration of the call, closed for all other communication. Packet switching does not require closed lines. On the contrary, a system of open channels is needed for it to function. So, instead of merely eliminating physical distance, digital networking also opens up a virtual space between place A and place B, a new frontier, room to move, to communicate and to interact with others as well as with software, from virtual banking to gaming. In contrast to mechanical and industrial networking, the new digital practices of networking that allow for interactive and transmedial peer-to-peer communication, while at the same time making it possible to deliver virtualized goods in seconds or minutes around the globe, can be called Networking 3.0. Its central principle is virtualization, i.e., the conversion from hardware practices G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 68 and artifacts to software programs and software files, and its most important technique in regard to communication and transportation is virtual spatialization, the transformation of the distance between communicating parties - users - into a virtual space of (inter-) action. Like the bridge in the mechanical age, this new space of transportation and communication soon turned into a mythical, partly utopian, partly dystopian place, which promised freedom and fun but threatened to entrap and enslave. 12 What William Gibson famously called “cyberspace,” the new digital transmedium lent itself, of course, to new kinds of aesthetic forms, specifically audiovisual storytelling. With mechanical technology and culture the picture-frame stage with its curtain and numerous other techniques to manipulate space and time had evolved. Industrial technology and culture had given birth to the feature film with its heightened editing techniques that could create a new continuum of space and time. Not surprisingly, digital technology is spawning something radically new as well: nonlinear and interactive audiovisual storytelling. Games and specifically MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) make use of the unique qualities of this new global data space of communication and transportation, transforming it into a virtual meeting place and playground. The speed and size of the exponential growth since the mid-90s when the average citizen in the developed world became aware of the World Wide Web and more and more people also started to use it, didn’t seem incomprehensible just to most observers. The uncontrolled and random growth of the web was indeed incomprehensible even to those who then were studying and researching network effects. Almost thirty years after Stanley Milgram’s experiment had questioned Random Graph Theory, the counterintuitive result of ’six degrees of separation’ - the empirically researched truth that we are living in a so-called ‘small world’ - could still not be explained mathematically. In fact, a few years after Milgram’s experiment another study had even added to the confusion. Trying to research the most important social links in communities, Mark Granovetter asked people how they had found a new job. Not friends and family (“close ties”) were statistically most helpful, he discovered, but distant acquaintances (“weak ties”) and particularly those Granovetter called “bridges”: people who were part of different social circles that usually didn’t have contact (Granovetter). A quarter century later this observation of “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) helped solve the small world problem as it gave Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz the idea to improve on a regular Random Graph by adding randomly “weak ties,” break-out short cuts to other social environments. To their surprise, the computer simulation showed that only a few random extra links, while only minimally reducing the clustering, significantly decreased 12 See for example William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) or movies like Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) or the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003) by the Wachowski brothers. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 69 the separation between the nodes - down to the empirically proven “six degrees of separation.” As Mark Buchanan puts it: We find here an explanation not only for why the world is small, but also for why we are continually surprised by it. After all, the long-distance social shortcuts that make the world small are mostly invisible in our ordinary social lives. We can only see as far as those to whom we are directly linked - by strong or weak ties alike. We do not know all the people our friends know, let alone the friends and acquaintances of those people. It stands to reason that the shortcuts of the social world lie mostly beyond our vision, and only come into our vision when we stumble over their startling consequences. (55) Fig. 3: The Strength of Weak Ties. When Watts and Strogatz published their findings in 1998, it soon became clear that they had found the solution to an old problem but that their solution could only explain a small fraction of actual networking. The starting point for this discovery was the most popular result of digitalization: the World Wide Web. When physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his team sent out a web crawler to measure its connectedness, the findings fit neither the classical, still accepted Random Graph model nor the improved Watts and Strogatz model as both shared a relatively even distribution of links. On the web, however, almost 90 percent of all sites had only a few links - about ten - while very few sites, super connected hubs like Yahoo or CNN, had millions (Barabasi 58). The newly discovered network structure still allowed for the small world effect - a low degree separation -, but its main characteristic was a power law distribution in the number of connections to single nodes. Barabasi called networks of this extremely uneven connectedness “scale-free”: I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. (Barabasi 227) Soon he and others discovered that not only the Internet and the World Wide Web are structured like this: “In complex networks a scale-free structure is G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 70 not the exception but the norm, which explains its ubiquity in most real systems” (Barabasi 90). Very few highly privileged nodes can be found in networks as different as the AIDS pandemic and the English language, cancerous cells and air travel connections, social relations in Hollywood and the distribution of wealth in most developed countries. 13 Fig 4: Scale-Free Network. Digital networking - structured by a combination of small world qualities that enhance peer-to-peer communication and the exploitation of weak links on one hand and by the dominance of ‘aristocratic’ super hubs on the other - is increasingly shaping everyday life in contemporary post-industrial and not yet digital cities. The deployment of ever-faster mobile broadband access and the social diffusion of portable personal communicators are again causing radical transformations. The once pervasive influence of broadcast media - of its schedules as well as of its standardized content - is waning. The old analog electronic networks remote controlling city life in the 20 th century are being replaced by a virtual, i.e., software-based infrastructure produced by the spatialization of virtuality as well as by the virtualization of space. Fluid and pervasive, virtual information and entertainment is not just overlaying the material world as a separate level, it is permeating and augmenting it. Already certain parts and aspects of what we once considered the material reality of a city can be googled like a website. He or she who walks through a city offline these days is cut off from a wealth of glocal - global and local - virtual information and entertainment, communication and interaction that the next person has at hand or rather on their screen. Mass mediated proxy participation slowly gives way to virtual participation in an emerging and 13 In hindsight, Milgram’s famous experiment already showed that structure: One of its strange results was that the Boston stockbroker received most of the letters from just a few of his many acquaintances - from the few who were super connectors and social hubs. The reason for the existence of super connectors, Barabasi stated, was simply that networks don’t grow randomly as had been assumed for so long: “[T]he Network evolution is governed by the subtle yet unforgiving law of preferential attachment”, i.e., wellconnected nodes - websites, for example - are preferred by most users and therefore grow fast: “The rich are getting richer.” (Barabasi 86) Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 71 largely self-organizing virtual public sphere. In many respects it negates the anonymity, passivity and conformity of the national mass public. While it is far too early to say where exactly these developments will lead us, three possible elements of city life in the digital age are clearly taking shape. Epilog: “The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed.” 14 “Not all people exist in the same Now,” Ernst Bloch stated in 1932 outlining his concept of “Ungleichzeitigkeit” (22). Hard to translate, the term denotes a temporal incommensurability, a cultural nonsynchronism between individuals and groups effecting non-contemporaneity within societies. Presently, the diffusion of digital networking is escalating this kind of cultural and social misalignment by implementing what I call arbitrary globalization. In the near future, I think, we will be able to communicate in any medium with any other person wherever on the planet she or he may be. At the same time we should have, independent from our whereabouts, instant transmedial access to all knowledge that humanity has accumulated thus far. The social effect of this arbitrary globalization will be the intensification of virtual vicinity between individuals and groups separated by space and thereby as well the formation of virtual vicinities existing ‘next’ to the urban space we inhabit. As a complement to these processes of arbitrary globalization we will experience arbitrary localization. GPS navigators and smart phones already provide a glimpse how life in cities can be augmented when virtual information and virtual peer-to-peer interaction overlay and permeate the ‘real’ world. The combination of location awareness, i.e., the automatic filtering of globally available online-information according to our current location, and embedded information, i.e., real-time data that is locally made available by businesses, media, other users or as a public service, should create a new dense ‘virtual urbanity’ augmenting the city and its analog attractions. The social effect of arbitrary localization will be a virtual situatedness that turns social or geographic strangers into instant insiders enabling them to independently navigate an unknown urban space and to select its offerings as informed and confident as long-established residents. Last but not least, mobile networking should empower arbitrary association within the urban space. Many citizens in the developed nations already use software providing real-time ambient awareness to connect with friends and acquaintances that are close enough for impromptu meetings or short-term help but still out of sight and reach in the real world. At the same time the tremendous success of Open Source practices suggests to expand processes of self-organizing collaboration between like-minded strangers to areas other than software production. The information and opinions that individuals 14 William Gibson, qtd. in “Books of the Year 2003”, The Economist, Books & Arts, 4 Dec. 2003. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 72 collect virtually and the many contacts that the virtual sphere facilitates can trigger - as flash mobs have shown - collective actions in the urban space. The social effect of such arbitrary association, i.e., the ordinariness of personal encounters and collaborations with strangers driven by similar interests and goals, will be the emergence of a new virtual public sphere that turns virtual strangers into instant peers or “smart mobs” (Rheingold). In conclusion, cities and their networks have gone through three phases in modern times, accumulating processes and practices. During the mechanical age, transportation and communication depended on physical transport powered by biological or natural energy, the main networking principle being bridging, a material covering of the space between place A and B. In the industrial age, transportation accelerated as it gained access to new forms of energy while communication became separate from physical transport. The main networking principle in communication was switching, the technical elimination of the space between place A and B. In the digital age, communication as well as an important share of transportation moved into the virtual realm establishing on a higher technological level a new unity between the circulation of goods and news. The main networking principle now is a virtualization of the distance between place A and B, which opens up a new virtual space for communication and interaction. The historical analysis further demonstrated how each level of networking technology affected the cultural and social life, namely the practices of audio-visual storytelling and the structure of the public sphere. Theater, film and games exercise their narrative control of space and time in strong interrelation to the technological state of networking in the period they came into being: the theater covering space and time gaps with its curtain, the film eliminating these gaps through editing, games using the virtual space created by digital networking as their staging area. Similarly, the qualities and constraints of contemporary networks of communication effected that the public sphere of the mechanical age was local, therefore geographically fragmented and dominated by unmediated face-to-face discourses and interactions. With the industrialization of networking and media, the public sphere grew to be national, therefore uniform and dominated by mediated few-to-many proxy discourses and interactions. Now, in the early digital age, the public sphere changes again, becoming virtual, therefore geographically as well as socially fragmented and dominated by mediated peer-to-peer discourses and interactions. Reviewing the radical change that city life has incurred and trying to imagine the outlined trajectory of possible further change to arbitrary globalization and the establishment of virtual vicinity, arbitrary localization and the empowerment to become an instant insider as well as arbitrary association and the empowerment to become an instant peer, one cannot help but wonder how a citizen of a typical city of the mechanical or industrial age, if he or she could time travel, would perceive the emerging city of the digital age. But then, of course, Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known third law comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 73 Works Cited Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. 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Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Thacker, Eugene: “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, Part One.” CTHEORY. Eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. a142a. 18 May 2004 <www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx? id=422> (accessed 23 June 2010). Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking, 2001. Watts, Duncan J., and Steven H. Strogatz. "Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature 393 (1998): 440-42. A LAN T RACHTENBERG Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation The concentration of control does not come from the mechanization of industry. It comes from the state, which began about a hundred years ago to grant to anyone who paid a nominal fee what had hitherto been a very special privilege. That was the privilege of incorporation with limited liability and perpetual succession. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (1943), 13. When the modern corporation burst onto the American scene after the Civil War, one interested though bemused witness - a member of the Massachusetts railroad commission -called it “a new power, for which our language has no name.” 1 Nor was there an image ready at hand to say what it looked like. The railroad corporations were already transforming the land into a national system of railroad lines. Employing cheap Chinese labor (the “illegal aliens” of back then), government hand-outs, and unscrupulous business practices, a new gang of rapacious entrepreneurs, ‘Robber Barons’ 2 as they came to be known, piled up incredible wealth and political clout; they displayed their power and their apparent impunity with conspicuous disdain for moral or legal judgment. What to call this new power and how to describe what it looked like became pressing questions. Was the new power - the limited liability corporation -a material body you could actually see, touch, and describe as an image? Did it possess an inner life you could trust to be always what it seemed to be? Should it be described only by its effects, so many miles of track laid, so many acres of public domain colonized as private rights of way? In the minds of troubled observers, there was neither a familiar word for it nor an image to do it justice. Whatever you called them or however they seemed to look, the gargantuan railroad corporations enjoyed a privileged existence. Their capital drawn from public trading on the stock market, their investors shielded by limited 1 Charles Francis Adams writes in A Chapter of Erie: “We know what aristocracy, autocracy, democracy are; but we have no word to express government by moneyed corporations” (97). Adams’s elegant sardonic narrative has a place of honor in the history of investigative writing about financial corruption and ruthless corporate power in the first era of the large American corporation. 2 ‘Robber baron’ harks back to well-born highwaymen (Raubritter) who terrorized travelers in thirteenth century Germany (see Josephson). A LAN T RACHTENBERG 76 liability laws, they behaved like brash, free-wheeling individuals with a will of their own. By the end of the century the courts had ruled that in many regards that’s exactly what they were, juridical persons, fictitious beings but nonetheless real enough when it came to doing business. As for morality, not exactly a major public concern during these ‘gilded’ years of American history, echoes of the Protestant ethos still advocated fairness, honesty, and straight-dealing, values the large corporations in their arrogance mocked as irrelevant to the business of business. By the end of the 19 th century embattled farmers and workers had had enough, and, along with small businessmen and their allies in the independent press, they pinned new words on the by now entrenched corporate power: malefactors, predators, behemoths of greed and corruption. The genie of new wealth had become an ogre. An image appeared as if spontaneously: top-hatted, cigar-puffing Mr. Moneybags, clutching overstuffed sacks of coins against his bloated belly, a smug look on his face. Here was the latest guise of the old Satan. Since early in the twentieth century corporations have strived to replace this image of elemental demonic greed with more benign images, though in one variant or the other (e.g., CEOs in handcuffs) Mr. Moneybags still lurks nearby, never entirely expunged, always threatening to reemerge. But selfstyled corporate images very quickly won the upper hand, in newspaper and magazine advertising, on billboards, on radio and television, subliminally in cinema, and in the packaging of goods; clad in images, commodities became imaged messages that sold the corporate name and the idea of corporate goodness along with the packaged product. A history of images of the large corporation, images pro and con, would make for an astonishing document of on-going controversy and combat over the moral character and effects of ‘big business,’ one of the popular euphemism for the power of moneyed corporations. Such a history would also shed light on a neglected implication of Nicholas Murray Butler’s provocative remark in 1911, “the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times,” namely the corporate recruitment of visual culture as the mark of its presence and the sign of its dominance. By its image-making, the large corporation proves itself a major agent of cultural change, along with its more obvious social, economic, and political effects. As an agent of culture the corporation has been a double-edged force; just as images speak and keep silent at once, corporate images both reveal and conceal, its concealments being its most illuminating revelations. Its “greatest single discovery” (Butler) may well be the force of paradox, its cycle of creative destruction, tearing down while building up, which is the inner dynamic of corporate life. Do the corporate images which the self-image companies wish to portray show what corporations actually look like - their defining visage? The selfdefensive motive of these self-images is most often hidden, their goal of purging any trace of moneybags tucked carefully out of sight. This is what ‘slick’ means, that the rhetoric of the image be inconspicuous, its implicit argument against a negative view of corporate morality not openly acknowl- Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 77 edged. A first step in reading corporate self-images should be, then, to restore the argument, to bring the absent negative back into view. Corporate Images, Inc., a firm that sells “perception management,” explains its service like this: “A corporate image [is] the sum of the impressions that stakeholders (like customers, vendors, employees and the public) hold about your company.” The “ideal corporate image” is “congruent” - “what they see is what you are.” This ideal “sum of all impressions” constitutes the clientcompany’s “brand equity.” It’s not only true (“what you are”) but is something marketable (never mind the apparent contradiction), convertible into cash, not exactly what the company sells but what enables the company to sell anything at all: stakeholder confidence. Better than words alone -sense experience always trumps abstract verbalizations - visual images can achieve convincing “congruence.” It’s a matter of seeing and believing what you see. 3 But it’s not this simple. Images are usually multivalent, polysemous, and ambiguous; they mean too much at once. When it comes to visual images, isn’t there often something left over and something unsaid? Images pose dangers of misrepresentation. 4 With corporate images the problem is heightened by the ambiguity of the corporation in the first place, the fact that it owes its existence not to something describable as an object but to a legal process. At bottom the corporation has no inherent and definitive look. It can start out as one thing and quickly morph into another. Strip away trademarks, logos, typeface, color schemes, the entire branding apparatus of advertising, and what’s left? Is there anything there? The word corporation comes from the Latin, corpus or ‘body,’ which implies something tangible, fixed in space, a thing you can kick as well as see, a sensible thing. Yet begin to describe what a corporation is and you find yourself awash in abstractions like juridical or fictional persons, fictions consisting of imagined abstract relations among natural persons, relations fixed by a power that lies outside the body we want to describe. It’s the sight or image of exactly that intangible thing that we want to put into words. Corporations owe their existence to law, an array of words that initiate processes; they exist at all only if a state legislative body (another kind of corporate entity) has ruled that such and such a group of individuals, joined together for purposes of commerce, can call themselves a single entity or body, a corporation, and enjoy legal recognition as such. Legislatures charter such groups, and the charter, a written text filed away in some ‘official’ (sanctioned by the state) location, constitutes the sole ground on which the group can imagine itself as behaving as if it were a body unto itself. As Chief Justice John Marshall declared long ago but famously in the 1819 Dartmouth College decision, a corporation is an “artificial being, invisible, intangible and exist- 3 See <http: / / www.corporate-images.com> (accessed 20 June 2010). 4 Among many recent works addressed to the elusive fact of ‘the image,’ Jacque Ranciere’s The Future of the Image (2007), is one of the best, especially the discussion of the relation between images and speech, “between the sayable and the visible” (7). A LAN T RACHTENBERG 78 ing only in contemplation of law” (Trachtenberg 82-83). Marshall’s words may seem a bit paradoxical today: General Motors, about to go belly-up, invisible? Still, corporations in the news are no less generically invisible and intangible for making headlines. An account of what a corporation is can entirely dispense with saying or even speculating about a corporation’s physical appearance. There’s no reason even to try to say what any particular company looks like as long as you’re talking about what it is, its mode of existence. It’s a given that courts have ruled corporations to be (or have) ‘personality,’ that they stand in many regards (certainly not all) before the law is if an actual or ‘natural’ person. Law asks that this fictitious or imaginary entity take a name -in some states a number will do, carrying abstraction to another degree -and an address, a location in space, but not any necessary appearance, no particular visage, no distinctive look. Born of law into a universe ruled by words and the procedures they govern, the corporation might be imagined as an outwardly inert thing, something like that inscrutable jar in Wallace Stevens’s poem: “The jar was gray and bare./ It did not give of bird or bush.” But still, “it took dominion everywhere.” Like the jar, the corporation begins life as an abstract form, “round upon the ground/ And tall and of a port in air.” Against the “slovenly wilderness” of the hill in Tennessee where Steven’s “Anecdote of a Jar” is set, the jar in its abstractness, its perfect roundness, proffers a principle of order such as cannot be found in ‘slovenly’ nature but only in human artifacts, constructions of form of which law and poetry are supreme examples along with perfectly symmetrical jars, pots, and other fictions. Hardly exact, the analogy between corporate form and poetic tropes such as Stevens’s jar (or even his ‘supreme fiction’) goes at least part of the way toward explaining why being unencumbered by any determinative images at its point of origin can be a tremendous source of power for corporations. A new being has emerged under the seal of law, a fiction engendered by words and the implicit police power behind them, a written abracadabra: bodiless, imageless, a mere device set in motion by a charter to perform acts of commerce - buying, selling, the getting of wealth and/ or losing it. Does the device have a material identity, a substance and form we can always tell is this thing and not another? A simple way to affirm that corporations are tangible is to identify the company with its outward properties of name, address, physical possessions and appurtenances. But, as John Dewey recognized in a brilliant essay in 1926, once you grant corporations the status of judicial “personality” or “personhood,” you empower them with “the unlimited elasticity of fictions.” For, “imaginary creatures are notoriously nimble” (667). Corporations per se, then, are invisible except as words in a charter and perhaps a diagram, a flow-chart of internal organization. Not much to see, though the flow chart might be considered a kind of image. Without visibility in their own right, corporations have images, graphic signs they possess as protected property, visual signs like trademarks, logos, seals, labels, distinctive typeface and color scheme. And the mass of ads they buy to distribute Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 79 and circulate. Corporations create domains of visibility for themselves. Images give the corporation a public face for internal as well as external relations. And further, by virtue of that imaged or imaginary face, commerce becomes possible. Images provide outer vestments through which fictitious persons become competitive players in the marketplace. Hence corporate images are second-order facts, not present at the point of origin but essential for the chartered body to fulfill its purposes as maker, buyer, seller and purveyor of goods and services. The generic aim of the generic corporation is to serve the bottom line, and in pursuit of that, images prove as fundamental to the business corporation as its abstract statutory form. Visit any internet stock photography site, enter ‘corporation’ and the ensuing flood gives you a panorama of images by subject and by style that are deemed to proclaim ‘corporation.’ Here you can find virtually every stereotype of furnishings, posture, gesture - typically an office place or an office activity like lunch time meetings in a pub, conversation in the lobby, cell phone messaging on the street. Choose the exact picture that fits how you want your company’s ‘mission’ or its ‘culture’ to be seen or imagined. Take your pick: a soaring tall building in reflective glass, an office interior in soft colors, lots of wood showing, rows of cubicles signifying ‘busy as a hive.’ 5 Or contrive your own design according to the best advice you can buy from specialists in image management and customer relations. What you want is a credible image, not necessarily a true image. Credible is perfect for the function, which is to cloth the naked generic money-making corporation in softer, perhaps familial or communal tones. Make it seem friendly enough for consumers ardently to desire to do business with it, to wear its label, to receive monthly bills stamped with its logos. Not truth but effectiveness, a matter of the bottom line. Are corporate images not to be trusted? As a rule, better to be on guard whenever anything visual entices the eye; better to know what you’re buying before you seal the deal. Then, too, the diversity of meanings attached to ‘image’ should give us pause before we leap to any conclusions about the use of the term or specific image-effects. By image do we mean a likeness, a semblance of something that exists apart from reflection or imitation as image? Or do we mean a made-up figure, a signifier without a signified? Or an image presented so as to persuade you it is a real thing rather than a picture of something, hence a simulacrum, a simulation, a deceit? An image might stand toward its referent not as a copy or likeness but as a symbol or conventional emblem, like company logos. We have verbal images as well as graphic images. Any figure of speech, metaphor, simile, or metonymy, qualifies as image. Mirrors give off images as reflections. Images can be caught on the fly, cast off from shiny surfaces; they can be mental impressions, as when we speak of the kind of image a public figure makes or the image we have of a 5 The cubicle form is a major integer of the moral universe of the corporation. See the important essay by David Franz, “The Moral Life of Cubicles” (2008); cf. Schlosser. A LAN T RACHTENBERG 80 political party or a section of town - or of a brand of beer or underwear. Just as corporations require images in order to compete in the marketplace, so do commodities; both take on (or put on) image identities to disguise themselves as something other than what they are, something more or something less. The word image rolls off the tongue so easily and falls comfortably into place in our sentences, but since the 1960s, with the expansion of visual mass media and the work of Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) and others, image has emerged as a loaded, often tortured keyword of our times. In 1961 the historian Daniel Boorstin unleashed a screed against “the Image,” nemesis of the traditional role of “ideals” in American life, the role of courage, bravery, fortitude in face of “reality,” a concept giving way rapidly to “illusions” propagated by “the Image.” In a scolding tone reminiscent of seventeenth century Puritan jeremiads, Boorstin raises fears of America’s invisible foes: “We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we put in place of reality” (6). Is there something suspiciously ‘un-American’ about images? America suffers from a surfeit of her success, too much progress, too much prosperity, too many goods. We have created our own demons. The corporate image, he writes, is “the most elaborately and expensively contrived of the images of our age” (184). Nostalgia for a lost ideal world fills his lamentation with a sense of futility. Boorstin worries about the disjunction between corporate images and what he calls truth, a literal picture of the plain facts. He finds it symptomatic that companies try hard to live up to the images they contrive, rather than the other around. “An image is a visible public ‘personality’ as distinguished from an inward private ‘character’” (197). Boorstin writes as if he believes, though not with much conviction, that lost ideals can be recovered and the lost America restored simply by the screwing up national resolve. Other critics are less sanguine that hegemony of ‘the Image’ is a result simply of bad judgment and erosion of character. In Keywords (1976) Raymond Williams remarks that older uses of ‘image’ have been overtaken by the new force of “publicity,” which links image with “perceived reputation” whether of a brand or a politician. It has become “a jargon term of commercial advertising and public relations” (130-131). New technologies of reproduction play a major role in analyses of the newly acquired power of the image. Reality has seemed displaced or dissolved or colonized by images as thin as acetate film, images floating in emulsion, images constructed of pixels, digital fabrications with no necessary source in what they depict or imitate as faux likenesses. But behind the cameras and the computers stands the corporation, the master shape-shifter of our era, always in quest of further domination of market and world. In the ‘punk’ sci-fi classic, Neuromancer, author William Gibson imagines that giant holograms floating in the night skies will be the billboards of the near future, blurring the edge where sky ends and corporate image begins. In the acclaimed sci-fi and film noir thriller, Blade Runner, confusion between culture and nature, between the image and the real, arrives at an ultimate Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 81 plateau. Based on Phillip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the film focuses on that blurred edge between lie and the imitation of life in the figure of the “replicant,” a humanoid robot manufactured by a corporation as slave laborers on an outlying colony in space. Created in the image of human beings, fictional persons like corporations themselves, the replicants push against the fragile border between the real and the fictive. Novel and film look with some horror on the image-making function of corporations, yet also raise new questions about old ideas of personhood, nature, and culture. Novelist Don DeLillo has also made the irreality of image worlds a major theme. Photography, television, cinema, and the internet pose threatening challenges, seeming to sap reality from what they depict or imitate. Images or simulacra increasingly seem ends in themselves, secondary realities that increasingly seem to assert a power of their own. DeLillo views the menacing image-world as a function of the corporate world and its will toward domination. 6 In the dissolution of the very conception of the old ‘reality,’ some historians see paradoxical opportunities for radical re-thinking of social and personal terms like self, gender, society, person. Some historians argue that consumer culture, in which the image rules supreme, offers liberating prospects by enabling people to reimagine and realize their lives by choosing from among far wider options and resources than ever before (see Livingston, Pragmatism). 7 The rule of the image might well mark the demise of regimes of repression and inequality, if, as John Dewey argued, society could be led to realize the new egalitarian implications of the collective and corporate forms in the realms of production and distribution but not yet in social relations and in personal development of human capacities. Dewey took the corporation as an educative force, teaching skills and values of coordinated labor; it harbored seeds of individual liberation - a “new individualism.” Yet, the new remained dominated by old values of profit-seeking and narrow possessive individualism, the repressive individualism of class rule. 8 What do images have to do with the moral life of corporations and with its educative influences? Can anything be gleaned from corporate uses of images about the positive possibilities of corporate forms stressed by Dewey, the harmonizing and liberating values they subliminally inculcate? It’s through images that corporations perform their business and therefore can be said to have a moral life. Images are what we mean when we speak of the moral life of corporations; we can only speak of what is perceptible. How are companies seen by others, how do they see themselves? An image can be a picture in the mind based on an actual visual perception, a sense experience, 6 The theme is pervasive in DeLillo’s novels, especially in White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991). 7 For the argument that images have usurped realities and have left only “simulations” in place of “the real,” see Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1996 [1985]). 8 See Dewey’s Individualism Old and New (1930), especially chapter VII, “The Crisis in Culture” (121-145). Written virtually on the eve of the Great Depression, this eloquent brief book by Dewey remains particularly relevant and explosive today. A LAN T RACHTENBERG 82 or an artifact, perhaps in words, or photograph or sketch or painting, an object which makes a distinct portion of the world visible, makes it seem present, gives it imaginable reality. Images might be pure examples of visual experience but they embody thoughts as well as sights, they fuse pictures with ideas. In most common usage images of corporations are interpretations, usually of a moral or political sort. And in recent years, interpretations typically embody the severe judgment that corporations foster, shelter, and perhaps inherently enable corruption, criminality, and social pathology. 9 The first sentence of Joel Bakan’s book foregrounds the increasingly prominent use of image as a keyword: “as images of disgraced and handcuffed corporate executives parad[ing] across our televisions screens […].” Yet while these too-familiar images (they’re all about Enron) fall distressfully into the intimate spaces of our lives, “pundits, politicians, and business leaders are quick to assure us that greedy and corrupt individuals, not the system as a whole, are to blame for Wall Street’s woes” (1). One set of images begets another. Bakan shows that in the wake of public fear and anger stirred by the massive “merger movement” early in the 20 th century, AT&T inaugurated the first of what would become a standard feature of corporate life, an advertising campaign aimed at countering negative pictures of a soulless monster with positive images of a harmonious corporate family, good neighbor and responsible citizen of nation and world. The use of actual employees in these comforting ads gave them an air of plausible reality (17-18). The battle over the moral character of the corporation, over the good or the evil of big business, pits image against image, visual text against visual text. Starting early in the last century the makers of corporate self-mages have honed the skill of disguising self-interest as public interest, rendering the corporate world as natural, inevitable, attractive, perfectly fit to the order of things. The skill lies in disarming the viewer’s critical eye by hiding the rhetoric of the image, its subliminal ideological message, in the pleasure of the performance. 10 The viewer’s skill in critical reading of the message lies in deducing from internal and external clues the context of embattlement the image presumes, the presumed opposition to which the image responds without mentioning it. Corporate self-images typically sublimate the unacknowledged debate within which they take an interested position. 9 See especially Joseph LaPalombara’s essay “Corporate Corruption and Other Pathologies” (2004), Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation (2004), and the film The Corporation by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan (2005). 10 For examples of critical readings that free the message from the image by analyzing its semantic and ideological structure. See Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1977) & Mythologies (1972 [1957]). Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 83 Fig.: Brian Rea. New York Times (Feb. 1, 2009): WK 11. Can we tell from this image alone - a cartoon-like line drawing of a scene with three figures, two chairs, a water-cooler, three windows, and a wall in an enclosed space - that this is an argument against the idea that corporate jets are unseemly luxuries, signs of corrupt CEOs? By itself the image might be taken as a silent moment in a narrative centered on a conversation between two men draped casually around a water-cooler. Is the topic of the conversation something we wonder about? Is it something we need to know to make sense of the image? Isn’t it necessary only to know that there is a conversation on some matter of interest going on in this tilted space? They both look intent, yet an air of relaxation suffuses the scene; the seat on the left looks inviting and a third figure reclines in a seat on the right, eyes closed, neck pillowed in one of those noose-like contraptions that, together with the tilt of the floor of the room-like space, gives it away as the interior of a small aircraft. Why is it that we can tell even before we read the title of the New York Times Op-Ed page article the image accompanies -- “The Mile-High Office” -that this is a “corporate jet? ” The signals are not difficult to deci- A LAN T RACHTENBERG 84 pher; we’re conditioned to associate offices, white men in suits, shirts and ties, easy chairs, and water-coolers, with corporate offices, and corporations (it’s a matter of current events) with small private jet airplanes. And the title echoes the quixotic Frank Lloyd Wright design in 1956 for a “Mile High Skyscraper; ” it was never built but by association the title transfers the ideaimage of a skyscraper to the cozy little cabin in the sky. The play of image and word evokes the unspoken and unpictured figure of the skyscraper, the favorite icon of corporate power. We know then where we really are. How does this pleasant if somewhat ambiguous little scene in the sky serve the argument of the Op-Ed piece? The article opens: “Business jets are a force for good. Really.” That conversational “really” packs a wallop. This is a no-nonsense piece of opinionate editorial say-so, about jets, business, corporate offices high in the sky; the title alludes obviously to skyscraper office towers. “Force for good,” to which the “really” refers, plants the ‘opinion’ firmly in the discourse of morality, ‘good’ taking its meaning from an unspoken assumption of what and where ‘the good’ is. The jet represents a choice on the part of corporations - Citibank, in particular, is mentioned - to serve ‘the good,’ to be good. The author, William Garvey, editor-in-chief of Business and Commercial Aviation, chides Citibank for its craven cancellation of delivery of a $42 million jet. The facts adduced in support of ‘moral’ good against ‘moralistic’ indignation are 1) “more than a million people are employed manufacturing, maintaining, flying and managing business aircraft; ” 2) the industry thus contributes $150 billion to the American economy (hence, “force for good”? ); 3) if we don’t watch out, foreign manufacturers, who in any honest contest are “utterly trounced by American ingenuity and craftsmanship,” are likely to get an edge in market competition (e.g., don’t hurt our own guys by bad-mouthing their product); 4) a business jet is, after all, “merely a tool” (11). This brings us back to the image. According to the accompanying text, what the “The Mile-High Office” image gives us to see and believe is that the business jet is “merely a tool,” an instrument rather than end in itself. But a tool for what? Easy conversation, stretching your legs, catching a snooze? The article fills in one of the ‘goods’ the jet serves: because it can choose among many more public-use runways than commercial airlines, “[i]f two companies are competing for business, the one using a business aircraft can fly directly to one of those smaller airports and get to lunch with the client before the other guys taking the commercial airline show up.” It’s Poor Richard over again, the early bird, the worms, and so on. It’s all about delivering the goods in more senses than one. Moreover, your own guys will show up “better prepared” - they’ll have had the advantage of laying plans in confidence, polishing their PowerPoint spiels, private use of phone, internet, and Blackberry. “These jets,” in short, “are offices that move.” And the image shows this in at least two ways. The downward tilt conveys descending motion (perhaps a sly touch on the artist’s part? ); look at the water level in the cooler; the standing figures, proper corporate types by the look of their cloth- Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 85 ing, balance themselves nicely. They are in the groove. Corporate men know how to keep steady when turbulence rocks the office boat. The ship may be going down, but it will surely be a safe landing. In addition to the rhetorical purpose of defending the corporate jet against charges of profligate waste and insensitive display, the image works too in less obvious ways. One is its picture of ‘office’ as a place of ‘work.’ Lounging and chatting by the water cooler? The article mentions phones, Blackberries and PowerPoint. No sign of these, nor of other tools of office work. Is their absence itself a sign? Also absent are desks, no hint of cubicles, that pervasive product of the corporate version of rationality (see Franz). Nor any sign of corporate hierarchies (they go with cubicles), the top-down flow of power within corporations that make them perhaps the least democratic of institutions in American life. These absences are glaringly visible. Are they telling? Also absent, needless to say, are those mentioned in the article among the millions of people employed by the business jet industry, including factory workers and mechanics. Between blue and white collars there seems no visible link. A cozy spruced up self-image of the corporate work-place, high in the sky and apparently coming in for a landing. A second hint insinuated by “office that moves” is that the corporate form reproduces itself anywhere; it can move with apparent ease from ground to sky, from space to space, because it has no essential location, no single set of dimensions or necessary shape. It has indeed no essential or necessary or inevitable visual image. ‘Corporate image’ gets attached to ‘corporate form,’ an abstraction whose initial and originating embodiment is a written document, a license, a charter, a set of legal terms laying out conditions that enable the group of persons that form the ‘corporation’ to do business as if, in many ways, it were a natural person. The unspoken insinuation of the milehigh office image is that the corporate form gives companies license to project themselves as whatever and wherever they wish to be, whatever they believe will further the ‘good’ they represent. The op-ed article identifies ‘good’ with an edge in competition for customers, for sales, for profit: the everyday struggle the fierceness of which is belied by the guise of ease, calm, security, confidence, as the tiny aircraft tilts downward, back toward the business of business. ‘If you truly need to be there and there and there and back by seven,” Mr. Garvey confides reassuringly, “aircraft may provide the only way.” The point strikes home: offices a mile high rule the market, not to say the world. Get on board! Corporate images make us wonder whether we can expect new ideas of the good to come from within corporations as we currently know them. Change will take collective desire for a different kind of corporate look, a change of garment and face more thorough than the term ‘reform’ usually implies. What’s needed before anything else is a revived regulatory regime. That will take a new collective will to redefine the corporate mission in a way that chastens the private profit motive with a vision of public responsibility. Is this imaginable, replacing the bottom line with the social good? The earli- A LAN T RACHTENBERG 86 est charters of corporations in the U.S. - for roads, bridges, canals -had in mind subordination of private profit to the public profit of improved infrastructure and social well-being. To return to this original understanding of the function of corporations - public ends served by authorized private means under democratic control-would be literally to re-form corporations in basic ways, toward participation with other corporate bodies, including non-business bodies and the multiple publics of the citizenry in civil society, in a democratic process of deciding where the social good lies, what sort of negotiations among interested parties need to be undertaken to seek out that good and to pursue and to effect it. Rather than instruments of collective ends as originally envisioned, corporations have been shelters and instigators of anti-social and anti-democratic behavior, to put it mildly. Mile-high salaries, extravagant bonuses, stock options, bribery of all sort: in these is the look of dangerous pathology. It has rarely been clearer that the business of business is everyone’s business; boundary lines between public and private have to be redrawn; indeed the corporation has already redrawn the lines, only for selfish private gain rather than for democracy. It’s a tautology to say that corporate images directed outward to the public serve inward-turning private ends. But the same images have insights to offer to those who read against the grain. They can be taken apart in ways that undercut their message simply by exposing it. Such readings can spur us to imagine other ways of doing business. By paradox corporate images can help show a way and provide a method and a weapon to bring alternative ends forward. The first step is to overcome the spell of the image, then to brush against its grain to see what counter-image or alternative picture lies concealed in plain view on the surface. By their visage shall they ever be known. In the domain of the image there is always more than meets the eye. 11 11 This essay has been republished with kind permission by the author. An earlier version appeared in The Hedgehog Review 11.2 (March 2009): 19-31. Images, Inc.: Visual Domains of the Corporation 87 Works Cited Achbar, Mark, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan. The Corporation. DVD: Zeitgeist video, 2005. Adams, Charles Francis A Chapter of Erie. Boston: Field, Osgood, 1969. Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Free Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972; originally published in France in 1957. ---. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. 32- 51. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1985. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1962. Butler, Nicholas Murray. “Why Should We Change Our Form of Government? ” Address before the Commercial Club of St. Louis. 27 Nov. 1911. DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. ---. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985. Dewey, John. Individualism Old and New. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1930. ---. “The Historic Personality of Corporate Legal Personality.” Yale Law Journal (XXXV, April 1926): 667. Franz, David. “The Moral Life of Cubicles.” The New Atlantis 19 (Winter 2008): 132-139. Garvey, William. “The Mile-High Office.” New York Times. “Week in Review” 1 Feb. 2009: 11. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Josephson, Mathew. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934. LaPalombara, Joseph. “Corporate Corruption and Other Pathologies.” Journal of Future Studies 8.4 (July 2004): 61-73. Lippmann, Walter. The Good Society. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1943. Livingston, James Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850- 1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994. ---. Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. New York: Routledge, 2001. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw- Hill, 1964. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982. Ranciere, Jacque. The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2007. Schlosser, Julie. “Cubicle: The Great Mistake.” Fortune 22 March 2006. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. A LAN W ALLACH The Persistence of the Panoramic: Technologies of Vision in American Culture from the 19 th to the 21 st Century Introduction Anyone who drives along America’s highways sooner or later encounters a sign announcing a scenic overlook. Pulling into a parking lot, we find ourselves looking down at an extended vista, often with the aid of pay-per-view telescopes or binoculars. We may feel awed by the vastness of the scene, perhaps even a touch of vertigo as we stare at the Pacific Ocean from a bluff north of Big Sur or at the Hudson River from a pull-off high in the Catskill Mountains. Yet even if the experience of a panoramic view can often be dizzying and overwhelming, its attraction is undeniable. For tourists to New York City, a trip to the top of the Empire State Building or a helicopter tour of Manhattan is often de rigueur. And no American Grand Tour is complete without visits to the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls - both characteristically viewed from a cliff or promontory that gives onto a vast open space. I will begin by describing this commonplace landscape experience because as a cultural practice it seems to naturalize itself. It recapitulates a particular imaginative relation between viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle - a relation whose pervasiveness pretty much guarantees its invisibility. In this essay, I explore the history of this type of relation, which, as I shall argue, pervades American visual culture. 1 1 Landscape and Domination Despite the singularity of the term, landscape can be many things: one of the less pleasant things it can be is an aspect of domination. As W. J. T. Mitchell has observed, “landscape might be seen [...] as something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism” (10). Taken by itself, Mitchell’s statement reduces to a clever aphorism. However, the aphorism glosses a complicated argument for a critical approach to the study of the history of landscape vision that can be abbreviated as ‘landscape as ideology.’ At the risk of reiterating what may be 1 This article borrows elements from my own essays “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke” (80-91, 310-312), “Accounting for the Panoramic in Hudson River School Landscape Painting” (78-89), and “Afterword” (315-321). A LAN W ALLACH 90 well known to you, I will recapitulate, schematically, one version of ‘landscape as ideology.’ The western landscape tradition centers on a subject-object relation that can be described in terms of antithetical or opposed pairs: ‘me-it, self and other, viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle. In this tradition, the viewer-subject dominates imaginatively an expanse of actual or represented landscape, seascape, or cityscape. The relation I am describing is a form of alienation, of “not belonging,” but it is not only, as Robin Kelsey has argued, humanity “not belonging to the totality of [terrestrial] life,” but also the more familiar representation of humanity divided into classes, a representation of social hierarchy and division (203-13). Landscapes of this type caused the viewer to objectify the viewed, to see it as disconnected, as other. Historically, the type of landscape I am describing prompted the viewersubject to identify, symbolically, with dominant forms of social and political power. In England in the early modern period, the prospect was the leading landscape type. Initially a literary convention, it became in the course of the eighteenth century an established landscape-painting genre. A prospect was, in the critic James Turner’s words, “the expert presentation of distant views (not necessarily of countryside) to create the illusion of realism and totality” (290). Totality was key. As Carol Fabricant has written, in the eighteenth century mountain peaks and other promontories became central features of aristocratic landscapes--and later important features of the landscape toured and described by those who aspired to replace the nobility in the newly emerging social order. From such heights the eighteenth-century spectator, like a lord overseeing his creation, was able to “command” [as the aesthetician William Gilpin wrote] a view of the country stretching out beneath him and thereby exert control over it in much the same way that the aristocratic class (at least through the seventeenth century) ruled over those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. (“Landscape” 56) A few lines from The Traveller; Or, A Prospect Of Society, Oliver Goldsmith’s famous poem of 1764, underscores this point: […] where Alpine solitudes ascend, I sit me down a pensive hour to spend; And, plac`d on high above the storm’s career, Look downward where an hundred realms appear; Lakes, forests, cities, plain, extending wide, The pomp of kings, the shepherd’s humbler pride. (qtd. in Eliot) Goldsmith’s protagonist, exempt from the storms and troubles of the world below, oversees the “hundred realms” that represent “society” - a relation between viewer and viewed that was soon replicated in the painted panorama. The Persistence of the Panoramic 91 2 The Panoramic In the eighteenth century, English artists made the prospect one of the most familiar landscape painting conventions. Yet when it came to representing the totalizing vision Goldsmith and others described, it proved insufficient. In the 1780s English and American artists, including the Marylander Charles Willson Peale, spurred on by such recent developments as balloon ascents and the proliferation of tower and steeple views, were developing new representational techniques: Peale, for example, experimented with a drawing device that he used in an attempt to render a circular bird’s eye view from, significantly, the dome of the Maryland State House in Annapolis (see Bellion). This growing interest in the representation of a totalizing vision led, almost inevitably, to the invention of the panorama. Robert Barker created the first large-scale panorama in London in 1788; the word panorama - meaning, literally, all-seeing (from the Greek pan + horama) - was coined a few years later. 2 Typically, panorama paintings were exhibited in specially designed rotundas. To view a painting spectators climbed a tower, located at the center of the rotunda, to a viewing platform. The viewing platform was positioned in such a way that the painting’s horizon-line roughly coincided with the spectators’ eye level, which meant that spectators experienced a sensation of looking down upon the scene. This was only one of several carefully calculated visual effects. The painting was illuminated by hidden skylights, while the rotunda and its contents (the tower, the viewing platform) remained shrouded in darkness. The resulting contrast between light and dark, between the painting and the ghostly or insubstantial realm inhabited by the spectators - who thereby became anonymous and invisible witnesses to the scene - produced a powerful trompe-l’oeil effect, making the painting the only visible ‘reality.’ All this was done to maximize visual drama since spectators did not casually come upon the painting but emerged from the shadowy space of the tower onto the viewing platform where the painting suddenly burst upon them. This was a dramatic and no doubt sublime moment that early panorama visitors often found overwhelming. Viewing a panorama could result in dizziness and, according to one German visitor to an early panorama, “Sehkrankheit,” or see-sickness (Oettermann 12-13). The panorama might thus be thought of as a machine or engine of sight in which the visible world was reproduced in a way that hid or disguised the fact that vision required an apparatus of production, and that what was being produced was not only a spectacle but a spectator with a particular relation to ‘reality.’ The historian Stephan Oettermann has argued for the historical specificity of panoramic vision: that the invention of the panorama belongs to a period of political and industrial revolutions - a period in which new forms of mid- 2 The most comprehensive history of the panorama is Stephan Oettermann’s The Panorama, History of a Mass Medium (1997 [1980]). See also Avery et al; Corner; Hyde. A LAN W ALLACH 92 dle-class hegemony arose - and that the panorama itself encoded these forms. Consequently, Oettermann along with Michel Foucault linked the panorama to Jeremy Bentham’s almost contemporaneous invention of the panopticon (the word panoptic also translates as all-seeing), a circular prison with a tower at its center designed for the constant surveillance of inmates. 3 In the panopticon, inmates were subject to an anonymous authority, “the eye of power” or “sovereign gaze,” as Foucault called it, that emanated from the tower. The sovereign gaze represented a new equation between vision and power - power that now aspired to total domination. The panorama embodied a similar ambition. In the panorama, the world is presented as a form of totality; nothing seems hidden; the spectator, looking down upon a vast scene from its center, appears to preside over all visibility. 4 This analysis leads to what might be called the panoramic or panoptic sublime. Having reached the topmost point in an optical hierarchy, the visitor experienced a sudden access of power, a dizzying sense of having suddenly come into possession of a terrain stretching as far as the eye could see. The ascent of a panorama tower as part of what might be called the panorama ritual was in this respect a stunning metaphor for social aspiration and social dominance. The multiple displacements involved - the way in which social meanings were projected onto the panorama painting; were absorbed into the forms of the painting; were often quite literally naturalized - should obscure neither the historic roots nor the historical specificity of the process. To the visitor the panoptic sublime was primarily a matter of vision; however, it was something else as well. The panoptic sublime drew its explosive energy from prevailing ideologies in which the exercise of power and the maintenance of social order required vision and supervision, foresight and, especially, oversight - a word equally applicable to panoramic views and to the operation of the reformed social institutions of the period: the prison, the hospital, the school, and the factory. Oettermann and Foucault demonstrated that the panorama and the panopticon represent an aspect of modernization. Panoptic vision was intimately bound up with maintaining social hierarchies and disciplining a potentially rebellious, or at least recalcitrant, working class. Symptomatically, the initial idea for the panopticon came from Jeremy Bentham’s brother Samuel, an industrial engineer in Russia and England, who during the 1780s planned a 3 See Oettermann (5-47); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (195-228, 317, n. 4) & “The Eye of Power.” Foucault speculates that Bentham may have been inspired by Barker’s panorama but Bentham’s own account seems to preclude this (see also Bentham; Evans) 4 It is impossible in a relatively short article to develop the historical bases for equations between vision and power in landscape painting although I would observe that the equation was never as abstract as it appears to be in Foucault’s writings. It should also be said that in landscape painting the equation evolves from an identity between sight or vision and land ownership to metaphorical forms in which landscape comes to signify “a well-constructed survey of the nation’s prospects” as seen through the eyes of an aristocratic elite (see also Turner, Politics; Fabricant). The Persistence of the Panoramic 93 shipyard for St. Petersburg that would be built in the form of a panopticon (see Christie). Here we encounter, in a literal form, a fundamental connection between the factory and the prison. The panopticon symbolized the world of labor discipline as well as penal reform; the panorama, by contrast, was a form of middle-class entertainment. The relation between panopticon and panorama epitomizes the often-unremarked connection between work and leisure in capitalist society. In Bentham’s panopticon, a solitary guard or overseer hidden in a central tower, a representative of the modernizing bourgeois state, controls, visually, the inmate population while the means of violence needed to secure his authority remain as it were hidden in the wings. The panorama aestheticized an almost identical relation between subject and object. It offered the visitor the thrill of acquiring visual mastery - the panoptic sublime - but its object was not the inhabitant of a prison but a circular painting representing a landscape, a cityscape, or a battle scene. The visitor presided over the visual field and thus identified with the “eye of power” (Foucault) - in effect identifying with the viewpoint and interests of a newly ascendant bourgeois class. As a form of entertainment, panorama paintings appealed to an urban audience’s curiosity about faraway places, giving an expansive but also proprietary view of what was foreign. It furnished a similar view of the familiar. Londoners never seemed to tire of panoramic views of London as seen from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral or, in Barker’s panorama, from Albion Mills, built in 1784 as the first of London’s first steam-powered grist mills and unforgettably described by William Blake as “dark Satanic mills” (see Hyde 57-89). Panoramas also featured battle scenes, which were especially popular during the Napoleonic Wars, and which needless to say, appealed to and reinforced patriotic sentiment. 3 The Rise of the Panoramic in the United States Inhabiting the eye of power, the panopticon guard or panorama visitor’s relation to ‘reality’ was mediated by his or her identification with the power of the state. The panoramic mode in effect supported the state’s claim to stand over and above society as well as its claim to centrality in a world in which the distant and foreign fell under its purview. During the nineteenth century the panoramic mode became a key feature of bourgeois culture, and nowhere more so than in the United States, where landscape tourism, landscape literature, and landscape painting and photography augmented and reinforced a view of the world in which the state’s imperial agenda - seizing by force of arms nearly two-thirds of Mexico’s national territory, conquering the American west by displacing and annihilating Native American populations, ‘opening’ Japan - took on the appearance of inevitability. Barker’s London panorama proved an immediate sensation and the panorama soon became a familiar form of popular entertainment not only in England, but also in France and the United States. The first American panorama A LAN W ALLACH 94 appeared in New York in 1795, only a year after Barker opened his Leicester Square rotunda. During the first half of the nineteenth century, panorama paintings were to be seen in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, New Bedford, and New Orleans. The history painter John Vanderlyn opened a rotunda in New York in 1818 with a panorama painting of Versailles. In 1837, Frederick Catherwood, today mainly remembered for his later travels to the Yucatan to record the remains of Mayan civilization, built a wooden panorama rotunda in New York City modeled on Barker’s in Leicester Square. There he exhibited panoramas of Jerusalem, Thebes, Balbec, Lima, Rome, the Bay Islands of New Zealand, and Niagara Falls, until a fire, in July 1842, put him out of business. 5 Although in the United States actual panoramas were relatively few and far between, at least compared to what one writer described as the “Panorama-mania” that swept London in the early years of the nineteenth century, panoramic vision virtually defined American landscape tourism during the period 1800-1870. The panoramic played a parallel role in American landscape literature, and was the principal feature of Hudson River School landscape painting or rather, as we shall see, Hudson River School painters developed the artistic means to represent on two-dimensional canvases the three-dimensional experience of panoramic vision. In what follows, I consider in order landscape tourism, landscape literature, and landscape painting. Beginning in the 1820s, American and foreign sightseers, following what was soon to become a standard landscape tour of the northeastern United States, climbed Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts and Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. 6 They visited the Catskill Mountain House, perched on a high cliff, where on a clear day they could take in a stunning, panoramic vista of the Hudson Valley (see Van Zandt; Myers). They traveled to Niagara Falls, where the Terrapin Tower, built in the late 1820s, in effect functioned like the tower in a panorama rotunda, allowing visitors to view the falls and the surrounding terrain as one vast natural panorama (see Adamson, ed.; McKinsey). Indeed, towers became - and continue to be - a frequent feature of American landscape tourism. For example, around the year 1810, Daniel Wadsworth, a Hartford financier, patron of the arts, and amateur landscape painter, built an estate on the summit of Talcott Mountain six miles west of Hartford. Tellingly, he named his estate Monte Video (mount of vision). Monte Video had its gardens, boathouse, icehouse, tenant farmer and working farm, but the feature that drew landscape tourists was a fifty-five foot viewing tower located near the mountain’s summit. From the tower, a sightseer could take in a panoramic view of the Connecti- 5 For a history of the panorama in the United States, see Avery (“The Panorama” passim). 6 For early landscape tourism, see Sears’s study Sacred Places, American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (1989). For the White Mountains, see Brown and Keyes et al. For Mount Holyoke tourism, see Doezema; George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum; Graci. The Persistence of the Panoramic 95 cut Valley extending forty-five miles in all directions (see Wallach, “Wadsworth’s Tower”). At Monte Video and other designated touristic sites, tourists replicated the panorama ritual. Here, for example, is the painter Thomas Cole in a letter of 1827 describing to his patron Daniel Wadsworth his ascent of Red Mountain in New Hampshire: I climbed [Cole wrote] without looking on either side [in other words, as if he were climbing the tower of a panorama]: I denied myself that pleasure so that the full effect of the scene might be experienced - Standing on the topmost rock I looked abroad! - With what an ocean of beauty, and magnificence, was I surrounded. 7 Cole was twenty-six when he penned his letter to Wadsworth and he had yet to visit an actual panorama; but he had already been to the Catskill Mountain House and had climbed Wadsworth’s tower at Monte Video. Confronting the ascent of Red Mountain, he knew precisely how to experience a mountaintop view. Cole had also read James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers, America’s first bestselling novel. It contains a remarkable passage celebrating the panoramic vision. I have traveled the woods for fifty-three years [says Natty Bumppo] and have made them my home for more than forty; and I can say that I have met but one place that was more to my liking; and that was only to eyesight, and not for hunting or fishing. […] There's a place in [the Catskills] that I used to climb to when I wanted to see the carryings on of the world, that would well pay any man for a barked shin or a torn moccasin. […] [T]he place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet, so much up and down. [Natty's companion asks: ] “What see you when you get there? ” […] “Creation,” said Natty, […] sweeping one hand around him in a circle: “all creation.” (Cooper 279) 8 Natty’s gesture evokes nothing so much as the experience of a panorama. The place he is describing is good “only to eyesight,” but it is also his favorite place in the world, for it is here he can experience totality. Whatever the actual limitations of the scene, he sees nothing less than “all creation.” Natty described an actual place known as the Pine Orchard, which is located on the Catskill escarpment not far from the village of Catskill. In 1824, a year after the publication of The Pioneers, a local entrepreneur opened the Catskill Mountain House at the Pine Orchard. It was the United States’ first landscape resort and for several decades its most fashionable hotel (see Van Zandt). 7 Thomas Cole to Daniel Wadsworth, August 4, 1827. Qtd. in McNulty, ed. (10-11). 8 The passage adumbrates similar passages in later works of American fiction, most notably, perhaps, in Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. A LAN W ALLACH 96 4 “The Panoramic School” 9 Scholars have often called Thomas Cole the ‘father’ of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Born in 1801 in Lancashire, the heart of the English industrial revolution, Cole immigrated with his family to the United States in 1818. Seven years later, he achieved a stunning success with three paintings of scenes in the vicinity of the newly opened Catskill Mountain House. Acclaimed at twenty-four as the United States’ premier landscape painter, his career somewhat followed the expansion of landscape tourism. 10 Cole’s success depended, in large measure, upon his mastery of the conventions of Anglo-American landscape painting. For example, Niagara Falls (fig. 1), a painting he executed in 1829, is almost a textbook example of the prospect convention: Cole situates the viewer on the American side of the Niagara River looking south toward the American and Horseshoe Falls. He places the tiny figures of two Native Americans on a small rocky promontory in the foreground to the left (like many of his early landscapes, Niagara is cast in a Cooperesque historical past tense). The eye moves along a diagonal from the promontory to the tree-covered slopes on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, to the falls in the distance, to the black and gray rain clouds above the falls, and finally to a patch of light blue sky surrounded with white and gray clouds tinged pink by the setting sun. Yet, if in the early years of his career Cole invariably employed established landscape painting conventions, he was also aware of the inadequacy of the representational formulae he used when it came to representing the experience of contemporary landscape tourists. He had experienced the American landscape as a panorama at the Catskill Mountain House, at Monte Video, and at Red Mountain. Traveling to London in 1829 (he remained there for two years), he very likely visited Thomas Horner’s London panorama, which opened the same year. By the time Cole reached Italy in 1831 he had worked out a plan to make drawings for a panorama of the Bay of Naples. The Neapolitan authorities worried that the artist’s interest was not in painting but in diagramming the harbor’s fortifications, put an end to his project. Still, he had by then begun to wrestle with the problem of representing the panoramic on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. He started to fill his sketchbook with drawings in an extended rectangular shape. Very soon the 9 During the 1870s, as the name ‘Hudson River School’ was gaining currency, members of a younger generation of artists also toyed with such names as ‘panoramic school,’ ‘Rocky Mountain period,’ and ‘Fogies.’ Each had its own particular sting; “panoramic school,” which was first used in 1876, represents a backhanded acknowledgment of the centrality of the panoramic for American landscape painting of the preceding decades (see Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School” 5). 10 For a biographical summary and a critical account of Cole’s early success in New York, see Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Course of American Empire” (23-28). The Persistence of the Panoramic 97 elongated rectangle became an all-purpose format, a signifier for Cole and for later American artists for the panoramic. 11 In 1833, shortly after his return to the United States, Cole made a panoramic drawing of the famous view from the summit of Mount Holyoke in Northampton, Massachusetts. Three years later, working from the drawing, he executed what later became his most famous painting: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (fig. 2), today usually called The Oxbow. Cole’s sketch of the view from Mount Holyoke has a width-to-height ratio of approximately twenty-two to seven (for the twopage spread). For the finished painting, the artist stuck to a more traditional - and more saleable - format with a width-to-height ratio of approximately ten and three-tenths to seven. Nonetheless The Oxbow enlarges the angle of vision. Instead of producing a view involving a ‘normal’ angle of vision of about fifty-five degrees, Cole manipulated The Oxbow’s composition in such a way that it appears to take in approximately 85 or 90 degrees (as opposed to the 110 degrees of the 1833 sketch). This effect is achieved by a tight juxtaposition of what are almost two separate views, the stormy prospect to the left, and the sunlit vista to the right. This split composition, with its abrupt transitions from left to right and from foreground to background, leads to a divi- 11 For a detailed account of Cole’s adoption of the elongated rectangular format and his attempts to simulate panoramic vision, see Wallach, “Making a Picture” (passim). Fig. 1: Thomas Cole, Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830, Art Institute of Chicago. A LAN W ALLACH 98 sion or bifurcation of seeing. Cole represents the equivalent of a section of a panorama without the panorama’s consistent and apparently seamless transition from point to point within the visual field. Instead, two related vistas are compressed or jammed against each other, so that a viewer scanning the landscape experiences both a feeling of panoramic breadth and a sense of imminent split or breakdown. There is, in other words, a spatial conflict in The Oxbow in which contradictory perspectives and modes of seeing, along with other sets of visual and symbolic oppositions - storm and sunshine, wilderness and pastoral landscape (the proverbial ‘Garden’) - produce a type of optical excitement, a cacophony of vision that can be taken as the pictorial equivalent to the exhilaration of the panoptic sublime. As an early experiment in the panoramic mode of representation, Cole’s Oxbow anticipated much that was to come later. By the 1850s, leading American landscape painters were beginning to abandon canvases proportioned according to the traditional golden section (a width-to-height ratio of 1.6: 1) and instead resorted to elongated rectangular formats (2: 1, 2.5: 1, 3: 1) that were themselves signifiers for the panoramic. Telescopes and viewing tubes allowed viewers to experience a heightened sense of visual control by alternating between panoramic breadth and telescopic detail - a dialectic already present in the panopticon and early panorama. By the late 1850s, the panoramic mode became the defining feature of American landscape painting. We Fig. 2: Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Persistence of the Panoramic 99 encounter it in popular, mainstream works, such as Frederic Church’s Niagara (fig. 3) which sparked a sensation when it was exhibited in the United States and England in the late 1850s. We also see it in much smaller paintings by so-called ‘luminist’ artists, for example in John Kensett’s View from Cozzens Hotel (fig. 4). Church’s Niagara was probably the most famous American painting of the nineteenth century. Displayed theatrically in a darkened room with gas jets focusing light on it, the painting demonstrated the artist’s unparalleled ability to engender belief in the reality and immediacy of the scene represented. 12 Seeing the painting for the first time, the influential English critic John Ruskin needed to reassure himself that the rainbow was painted and not a projection. Soon thereafter he pronounced Church heir to Turner’s mantle as the world’s leading landscapist. 13 When Niagara was exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, it won the admiration of the slickest of contemporary French academic painters, Jean-Léon Gérôme, who saw in Church’s painting the propitious beginnings of an American School: “ça commence là-bass,” he is reported to have said. 14 Niagara celebrated the United States’ most famous tourist attraction. Yet it also equated American identity with the panoramic or panoptic mode of vision. Representations of visual domination went hand-in-hand with American expansionism and imperial aspirations. Two years after he triumphed with Niagara, Church exhibited in New York his Heart of the Andes, derived from sketches the artist had made on his two trips to South America. Heart of the Andes made explicit the implicit equation between the visual and the political. In the age of Manifest Destiny, when American ruling elites dreamt of expanding American power throughout the Western Hemisphere, Heart of the Andes gave symbolic form to their aspirations. Shown in 1864 at New York’s Metropolitan Sanitary Fair - the fair was held to raise funds for wounded Civil War soldiers - surmounted by Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of the first three presidents, it figured symbolically the country’s past and future, its revolutionary origins and its postwar prospects. 15 Church depicted, among other subjects, South American volcanoes, Central American rain forests, and Arctic icebergs. His art epitomized American expansiveness. Other Hudson River School landscapists attempted to outdo him. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Albert Bierstadt produced monumental canvases representing the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite (see Anderson 12 Details of the painting’s actual presentation in New York are so far unknown. Kevin Avery, who has written extensively on the way in which Church’s Heart of the Andes was exhibited in New York in 1859, observes that in London Niagara was shown in a darkened room and illuminated by gas jets, and concludes that it probably was presented in the same dramatic, panorama-like fashion in New York (see Avery, “The Heart of the Andes” 52-72 & “The Panorama” 276-76, 334-35, n.8). 13 For Church and Ruskin, see McKinsey (243-44). 14 “It’s beginning there.” Qtd. in Huntington (4). 15 For Heart of the Andes, see Spassky et al (269-75). A LAN W ALLACH 100 & Ferber). Thomas Moran, an American follower of Turner, created even larger works. In the early 1870s, his vast panoramas, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and The Chasm of the Colorado (each painting measures 9.3 by 5.4 meters) were bought by Congress and displayed in the Capitol rotunda, as if to symbolize the nation’s conquest of its western territories (see Kinsey). Yet their success was short lived. By the late 1870s, the Hudson River School was falling out of fashion. Cole, Church, Bierstadt, and Moran had produced art for popular audiences - work that drew an equation between American iden- Fig. 3: Frederic Church, Niagara, 1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 4: John Kensett, View from Cozzens Hotel, West Point New York, 1863, New York Historical Society, New York, N.Y. The Persistence of the Panoramic 101 tity and panoramic vision. However, in the years immediately following the Civil War, as the American upper class increasingly institutionalized distinctions between fine or high and low or popular art, the work of the Hudson River School artists began to look vulgar and old fashioned. After the 1870s, representations of the panoramic became almost exclusively the domain of the producers of popular culture. Actual panoramas remained popular during the post-Civil War period - and in a variety of forms they continue to have an impact. For example, in the early 1880s, the French panorama artist Paul Philippoteaux and a team of assistants created three “cycloramas” depicting the battle of Gettysburg. 16 Two survive. One, now on view at the Gettysburg National Military Park, was recently restored. It measures 13 meters tall, 115 meters in circumference, and weighs 11,364 kilograms. It depicts Pickett’s charge, the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy” and the climactic moment of the most important battle of the Civil War - a battle in which 166,000 soldiers participated and 51,000 died or were wounded. In 1884, Philippoteaux’s cyclorama was advertised as a “sublime spectacle” presenting “glorious Gettysburg in all the awful splendor of real war.” 17 Today, two million tourists visit the Gettysburg National Military Park and a large percentage of them experience “the awful splendor of real war.” The division in the 1870s and 1880s between high and popular art resulted in part from disputes over verisimilitude. Should a work of art produce an illusion of reality? Or should it be the occasion for more refined, or as it were more aestheticized, forms of enjoyment? The panorama, as we have seen, involved a series of powerful trompe-l’oeil effects. And among the leading painters of the Hudson River School - especially Church and Bierstadt - representing the Real was the object of a sort of entrepreneurial competition. If we compare a detail of Cole’s Oxbow of 1836 with a detail of Church’s Niagara of 1857, we immediately observe that Cole had little interest in concealing his brush strokes while with Church it is generally impossible to discern his touch without the aid of a magnifying glass. Church took photography as his model of representational truth and consequently his paintings can be interpreted as efforts to embody an impersonal or as it were photographic ideal of objectivity in which the artist toils heroically to eliminate from the surface of the canvas all traces of the labor involved in producing an image. The result is a slick or licked surface that signals transparency but also results in a hard and rather shiny effect in the foreground. This highly refined surface technique also allowed the artist an unprecedented degree of control over tonal effects. Church seems to have had at his disposal an infinite range of hues, values, and intensities, and thus through the subtle ma- 16 For basic facts about the Gettysburg Cyclorama, see Greatest Work; Heiser; Oettermann (342-344); Renner. 17 Poster from the 1880s, cited in Renner, op. cit. A LAN W ALLACH 102 nipulation of color he could produce, among other things, the illusion that was said to have confounded Ruskin. The Hudson River School’s emphasis on photographic verisimilitude anticipated a succession of technological innovations associated with the panoramic: not only panoramic photography, which dates to the 1850s, but also innovations that marked the evolution of photographic, film, and television technology. When it came to film, almost every technical advance - sound in the mid 1920s, color in the late 1930s - was meant to appeal to a popular audience that put a premium upon seemingly life-like representations. Unsurprisingly, the panoramic played a central role in these commercially driven innovations. Attempts to produce films in widescreen formats began in the 1920s. 18 In the 1950s and early 1960s - decades in which Hollywood was desperate to find new ways to compete with the new medium of television - Cinerama enjoyed a short-lived success (see Belton 85-112; Carr and Hayes 11-40). Cinerama initially employed three 35 millimeter cameras to create an image with unprecedented detail and depth of field as well as a width-to-height ratio of 2.59: 1. Several travelogues were produced to showcase the breathtaking effects that could be achieved with the new technology as well as one fulllength feature, “How the West Was Won.” 19 This 1962 film featured eight big-name stars of the period including James Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, and Debbie Reynolds. As might be expected, it equated westward expansion with a stupendous representation of the western landscape as panorama. However, Cinerama technology was expensive and cumbersome. Projection required complicated camera set-ups and specially constructed theaters and screens. Presentations were big ticket, reserved seats spectacles unlike films shown at local movie theaters. Thus when it came to developing further widescreen technologies, Hollywood opted for more commercially viable approaches. From 1953 to 1967, Cinemascope dominated. It employed anamorphic lenses to project a film image with a width-to-height ratio of 2.66: 1 (later reduced to 2.37: 1) comparable to the extended format of Cinera- 18 Filmmakers were experimenting with wide film formats as early as the 1890s. By 1907, however, Edison’s 35 mm. film was made an international standard. During the 1920s major film studios in the United States, Italy, and France created wide gauge films for wide screen projection (see Carr & Hayes). John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema provides an insightful overview of the evolution of cinematic formats from the 1890s through the 1920s (12-51). 19 For acting and production credits, see “How the West Was Won,” Movie Guide <http: / / movies.amctv.com/ movie/ 23458/ How-the-West-Was-Won/ overview> (accessed 31 May 2010); “How the West Was Won (1962),” The New York Times <http: / / movies.nytimes.com/ movie/ 23458/ How-the-West-Was-Won/ awards> (access ed 31 May 2010); a plot synopsis and additional information can be found at “How the West Was Won (Film)” <http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ How_the_West_Was_Won_(film)> (accessed 31 May 2010). Ralph Hanson’s website devoted entirely to the film provides additional information. See <http: / / members.cox.net/ ralphhanson/ HTWWW/ frames. htm> (accessed 31 May 2010). The Persistence of the Panoramic 103 ma. The Robe (1953), a multi-million dollar Biblical epic, was the first film to be released in the Cinemascope format, with dozens following. 20 Since the 1960s, Hollywood, in its quest for ever-more ‘real’ effects, has continued its effort to refine technologies of widescreen projection. With Cinemascope, the extended format, signaling panoramic vision, became standard in the 1960s. (In the 1990s digital and high definition television followed suit.) IMAX (Image Maximum), which produces an experience of total visual immersion, has in recent years increased in popularity despite its unwieldy technology (see Carr and Hayes 183-87; Wollen 10-45). Like Cinerama, IMAX films can only be shown in specially-built theaters: the screen, while having a conventional width-to-height of 1.44: 1, can be as tall as eight stories. Because of the extraordinary sense of verisimilitude that can be achieved with the IMAX process, Christopher Nolan used IMAX cameras to film the action sequences in 2008’s smash hit, The Dark Knight. In early 2009, Warner Brothers released an IMAX version of the film. 21 Satellite photography represents the most recent addition to the list of panoptic innovations. Today anyone with access to the internet can view detailed satellite images of almost any place on earth - Brooklyn backyards, Golden Gate Park, downtown Baghdad, the house where you live. Satellite imagery produces, at least initially, something akin to the thrill of the panoptic sublime and thus tends to reinforce the viewer’s identification with a dominant power. Coda The pairing of panorama and panopticon underscore the close relationship between panoramic vision and what might be called the aesthetics of surveillance. If today we view with pleasure a satellite photograph, it is almost impossible to forget that satellite photography has its origins in the militarization of space. Similarly, if the panorama and panopticon once produced the fantasy or illusion of an omniscient and omnipresent state, new surveillance technologies, in particular closed circuit television (CCTV), constitute a fur- 20 See Belton (113-57) & Carr and Hayes (57-143). Belton calls Cinemascope “The Poor Man’s Cinerama.” On the role the new format played in the success of The Robe, see John Hartl, “The Robe introduced a new Scope” (15 March 2009): 6 Mar. 2010 <http: / / parallax-view.org/ 2009/ 03/ 15/ the-robe-introduced-a-new-scope>. For an account of interpretations of this wildly popular film, see Smith (1-15). 21 See Scott Bowles, “First Look: Enter the Joker—in the IMAX Format,” USA Today (29 May 2007): 28 May 2010 <http: / / www.usatoday.com/ life/ movies/ news/ 2007-05-28dark-knight-firstlook_N.htm>; Eugene Novikov, “Dark Knight Rerelease - Standard and IMAX - Set for January 23rd,” Cinematical (5 Dec. 2008): 3 June 2010 <http: / / www. cinematical.com/ 2008/ 12/ 05/ dark-knight-rerelease-standard-and-imax-set-for-january>; “The Dark Knight (Film)” <http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ The_Dark_Knight_(film)# cite_note-134> (accessed 28 May 2010). A LAN W ALLACH 104 ther realization of the state’s monstrous aspiration to omniscience and omnipresence. 22 As we observed at the outset, the panorama prompted viewers to identify with ‘the eye of power.’ Because the panoramic now pervades American culture, that identification has become habitual, reflexive, unconscious, and seemingly innocent. Most of us have paid a visit to the scenic overlook. Yet, as the United States increasingly becomes a carceral society, with 2.3 million, or 751 out of every 100,000, Americans now in prison, 23 and as the state becomes more and more obsessed with terrorism and ‘homeland’ security, Americans find themselves caught between the position of viewer and viewed, of subject and object. If representations of the world as ‘panorama’ inspire Americans to identify with regimes of surveillance, being the object of surveillance, as we increasingly find ourselves, leads to a different response. The former implies a politics of complacency, the latter, a politics of resistance. 22 See Clive Norris’s and Gary Armstrong’s study The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV (1999). This book mainly concerns the use of CCTV in the United Kingdom, but its analyses apply to the United States and other countries where CCTV is becoming a commonplace feature of everyday life. 23 Statistics for the United States prison population are widely available. For a useful discussion as well as a summary of the data, see Liptak. The Persistence of the Panoramic 105 Works Cited Adamson, Jeremy, ed. Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697 - 1901. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985. Anderson, Nancy K. and Ferber, Linda S. Albert Bierstadt, Art & Enterprise. Brooklyn, NY: The Brooklyn Museum in Association with Hudson Hills P, 1990. Avery, Kevin. “A Historiography of the Hudson River School.” American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School Painters. Ed. John K. Howat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. ---. “The Heart of the Andes Exhibited: Frederic E. 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R OLF G IESEN Metropolis, City of the Dead Fig. 1: The Subterranean City of the Workers, Metropolis (1926). Deutsche Kinemathek. The Wandering Shadow Through the ages picture makers had one objective: to make images alive and record mortal life. Photography and filmmaking eventually provided the key to open Pandora’s Box. The first artists to try and deal with the new techniques, however, were not the painters. Fischinger, Richter and others came in later. Among the first were the actors who hoped to have a record for immortality. They clearly had fallen in love with their mirror image and wanted to preserve it for posterity. One of the early acting stars of cinematography was the German Paul Wegener (1874-1948). He was the first German to walk through the mirror and sell his shadow (like Peter Schlemihl) or better his mirror image to the devil of the movies, as early as 1913 in Der Student von Prag. R OLF G IESEN 110 During World War I, in a 1915 lecture, Wegener, the original Golem of the movies, whose fascination with the romantic and fairy tales helped shape the creative destiny of his country’s fledgling film industry, spoke prophetically of his dream to engender an absolutely artificial, animated movie out of animated metamorphosis, a quarter of a century before Walt Disney produced Fantasia while animation was still in its infancy: You have all seen films in which suddenly a line appears, curves and changes its form. Out of it grow faces and the line disappears. To me the impression seems highly remarkable. But such things are always shown as an intermezzo and nobody has ever thought of the colossal possibilities of this technique. I think the film as art should be based - as in the case of music - on tones, on rhythm. In these changeable planes, events unreel which are partly identified with natural pattern, yet partly beyond real lines and forms. Imagine one of Boecklin’s sea paintings with all the fabulous tritons and nereids. And imagine an artist duplicating this work in hundreds of copies but with each copy having small displacements so that all copies revealed in succession would result in continuous movement. Suddenly we would see before our very eyes a world of pure fantasy come to life... We are entering a new pictorial fantasy world as we would enter a magic forest. We are setting foot in the field of pure kinetics - or optical lyric as I call it. This field will perhaps be of major importance and will open new beautiful sights. This eventually is the final objective of each art, and so cinema would gain an autonomous aesthetic domain for itself. A movie could be created which would become an experience of art - an optical vision, a great symphonic fantasy! (Künstliche Welten 69) This is a vision of a true parallel world created by the manipulation of a sequence of moving images, an illusion put together by the dream machine and mechanics of the cinema projecting a light beam, perceived by the human eye and transferred to the brain. Where does the idea to cut individual movements into separate frames come from? It must have been as old as mankind and art. Imagine setting up a monolith with the sun hitting its top. A wandering shadow will form (and perform) on the ground, and if you take a stick and mark that shadow frame by frame you will have cut that movement into individual frames. Observing the course of the sun and the moon requires a kind of thinking along the lines of sequential frames. This is what led to a scientific approach of single-frame animation, and therefore we nowadays use (digital) animation in research and industry to illustrate the shape and particularly simulate movements of the infinitesimal, the core of microcosm. Then there is the cult of cave art. Cave art depicting man and animals traditionally was illuminated by fire and thus, stroboscopically, seemed to bring to life again what was preserved by collective memory. This leads us to the (irrational) world of make-believe and religious art. Ghostly, atavistic images preserved life and ‘resurrected’ the dead. Consequently, the first personalities portrayed in early Daguerreotypes were people who had recently died. Metropolis, City of the Dead 111 From the Catacombs of Metropolis up to Outer Space What once started with the Shadow Plays in the Far East and China (where it was called pi ying xi) and with the first Zoetrope by Chinese inventor Ting Huan (in 180 AD), in late 19 th and in 20 th century developed into an industry of animated images that is still growing worldwide. The first animated films present a metamorphosis of the human face and shape, an innocent manipulation that apparently affected the integrity of the human body (Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by James Stuart Blackton, Fantasmagoria by Émile Cohl) similar to the digital images of our days, with the morphing process of human, animal and even robotic life (Terminator 2). Feature films rarely used trick photography for art as Wegener had hoped for, but rather for gigantism and the creation of artificial life, from Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse to the Machine Maria of Fritz Lang’s way-overbudget movie, Metropolis, conceived in 1924 and released in January 1927. The film was cut to pieces after its premiere failure and completely butchered in America before it was (almost) restored to its original form in 2010. Metropolis is a tale about the New Tower Babel, about the rise, fall and resurrection of mankind after overcoming the burden of class struggle. And it is a speculation about the God-like cloning of man. In front of Günther Rittau’s trick camera Brigitte Helm transformed into a robotic Galatea or an E.T.A. Hoffmannesque Olimpia who leads the uproar of the working class out of the catacombs of the dead. The motif came from Karel Č apek’s science fiction play RUR (1920). The figure itself, however, looked Teutonically medieval in appearance, a girl clad in armor. Fig. 2: Female (Brigitte Helm) transformed into Automaton, Metropolis (1926). R OLF G IESEN 112 Fig. 3: Female (Brigitte Helm) transformed into Automaton, Metropolis (1926). Both stills are located in the Deutsche Kinemathek. Trick photography and animation were also used in science and last not least for military purposes in World War I (map animation to illustrate the action on the fronts) and for training and propaganda films in World War II and thereby anticipated the destruction of Metropolis with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The doomsday imagery became the model for the Planet of the Apes and the TV images of the fall of the Twin Towers (those might have been inspired by products of the so-called entertainment industry like Jack Gold’s movie The Medusa Touch). Trick photography also became the means to promote the expensive financing of space and rocket technology and moon flight. As early as 1925 when Berlin-based UFA released an educational feature titled Wunder der Schöpfung (some footage was incorporated in the American Our Heavenly Bodies), cinematographers have looked up to the night sky. Even Fritz Lang originally wanted to end his Metropolis movie with scenes of space flight (as he told interviewer Peter Bogdanovich 1 and did so in Frau im Mond (1928-29). After World War II, in the era of Cold War, the race for the moon culminated in the famed collaboration of Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney on TV’s three-part Man in Space (1957) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which prepared Americans for NASA’s moon landing and intro- 1 See his book Fritz Lang in America from 1967: “In our original version of Metropolis, I wanted the son of the Master to leave at the end and fly to the stars. This didn’t work out in the script, but it was the first idea for Woman in the Moon” (125). Metropolis, City of the Dead 113 duced the idea of transforming man into a spiritual entity that Kubrick and his co-author Arthur C. Clarke properly named “space child.” 2 From Dinosaur to Man Not only Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) knew that imagery has a tendency of absorbing its creators. Some religions foreshadow with an often alarming tone too what kind of deluge might happen once you have opened ‘Pandora’s Box.’ On screen the resurrection of the dead had started with the extinct animal life of dinosaurs. In the early days of cinematography Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) in 2D, Willis O’Brien already created 3D dinosaurs for his film version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) in stopmotion technique (and German Major Hans Ewald followed and copied him in an educational entry released the same year, Aus der Urzeit der Erde - From Primordial Times). With the advance of computer technology Steven Spielberg was able to produce Jurassic Park (1993) and BBC an equally ambitious series, Walking with Dinosaurs (1999). Fig. 4: Ball-and-socket armature of the Cyclops, the stop motion creature from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957-58), designed and animated by Ray Harryhausen, engineered by Ray’s father Fred. First came the dinosaurs, then John Lasseter’s toys, Nemo and other fish, Ice Age mammals, finally caricatures of human beings (Pixar’s Up), James Cameron’s photorealistic Blue Man Group of Avatars that broke all box-office records and eventually there will be truly ‘life-like’ people, authentic reproductions which one day might even accept Academy Awards for Best Actress or Best Actor. 2 According to director Theo Mezger, Von Braun also helped a former employee, who by then was in charge of the technical facilities of Bavaria Studios in Munich, on the making of German TV series, Raumpatrouille, in the mid-1960s. R OLF G IESEN 114 In their striving for naturalism and photo-realism Americans seem to have fewer and fewer problems to reproduce believable human beings. In the long run synthetic actors will be unavoidable as we all need those ghostly avatars (a term taken from Sanskrit) representing us in the world wide web of digital images. Thus, one could argue, a new ‘master race’ of people is being created and future generations will be raised according to and accustomed to the aesthetics of the digital age from childhood on, preferring the sometimes questionable plastic surgery of the computer to the real thing. Synthespians In the history of animated films this process was supported by Max Fleischer’s rotoscoping device, which allowed artists to copy human movements exactly on drawings. In digital animation we advanced from biomechanics to what we now call motion analysis and motion capture. Synthetic actors, synthespians, will not only absorb our physical identity and movements like the ‘body snatchers’ from George Romero’s zombie world but will commence and master artificial intelligence which would make their appearance in an interactive scenario much more interesting and unpredictable. In interactive environments, more successful by now than the story-wise analogue product of the movie industry, one can better work with digital actors, as they are easy to transfer cross media, through the transcultural spaces of one medium to another. Out of once primitive video and computer games true parallel worlds will evolve one day, and the viewers thrown into them might either be seized and hypnotized by an irresistible comic world of sheer banality or overwhelmed by unknown optical lyric as Paul Wegener decades ago had imagined and hoped for. The question is if the animated images of the future will be created by the growing forces of dilettantes under the wings of YouTube who will by then have acquired cheap but greatly improved software as easily to handle for everybody as a photo camera or by professionals and, in the best case, devoted artists who are aware their an ethical responsibility. Standardization of Animation and Digital Media Product in Asia Asia and China will play a key role in the combat of digital forces. A quote from China Daily: Real estate and manufacturing are passé. For businesspeople and policymakers, the next gold mine lies in the animation and cartoon industry. Being a high-profit and emission-free, creative industry, animation has received strong government support and been blessed with large capital injections for its development in China in the past two years. More than 20 national-level and hundreds of provincialand regional-level animation clusters cradling the industry have cropped up in these Metropolis, City of the Dead 115 two years, while Beijing and a dozen-odd cities along the country’s coast have declared their ambition to be China’s ‘animation and cartoon capital.’ Welcome to the changing business priorities of 21 st century China. (30 April 2007). Critics, even in China, fear these cultural industries might lead to less culture and more industry, which results in standardization of product, taste and knowledge. The idea of ‘copying’ is an integral part of Asian and Chinese culture. With the demand of the industry to produce more and more, with the chance of financial revenues of billions of dollars there is a lack of quality in the business everywhere which contradicts what actor Paul Wegener foresaw in 1915. In 2008, China produced a total of more than 130,000 minutes of animation. In a mass like this it is almost impossible to detect any quality. So there are challenges as well as great dangers in the beautiful new world of digitally animated imagery, especially in manipulating life-like images. Is there a chance to escape the dangers of pictorial mass production for an overpopulated world that might end in the helpless, isolated cyberspace worlds of a William Gibson? Phantomology and Disembodiment While there might be synthetic societies commanding artificial intelligence as told by author Daniel Francis Galouye (Simulacron-3, 1964), a book from which the Matrix trilogy heavily borrowed, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Welt am Draht, the first film version of Galouye’s novel), Ray Kurzweil, America’s futurologist of the cyborg age, already predicts disembodiment. In less than a hundred years, images might be broadcast straight into the human brain which will serve as the ideal interface between the human and the digital world. In less than a thousand years, parts of mankind might have merged with the digital world. Right now we are on the threshold to virtualization. Phantomology, i.e., not putting the tiger into the tank but the body right into the brain, might become a welcome alternative to escape overpopulation on a polluted planet and a way to fulfill the spiritual ideal of Christianity. What Stanislaw Lem termed “phantomization” will allow no return to the world of the living but condemn the users to continue as spiritual record somewhere in Nirvana (another term from Sanskrit) with the total control of the human subconscious mind, its dreams and nightmares as side effect. In an interactive world, emotions will no more be evoked by means of empathy. Currently Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman (Oscar-nominated for Waltz with Bashir), a George Romero fan, prepares a film version of Stanislaw Lem’s 1971-published book The Futurological Congress in both live action and Flash animation. He hired American actress Robin Wright (of Forrest Gump R OLF G IESEN 116 fame) to play herself and sell her complete image and identity to Paramount Nagasaki. First the global company will release her motion capture avatar on screen, then use biochemistry and drugs to make everybody feel like their idol and create an imagery of a stunning environment that is no more than camouflage. One of the elder statesmen of visual special effects, Douglas Trumbull (2001, Brainstorm), predicted artificial manipulation and control of emotions to be one of the most powerful, dangerous tools. Biochemistry might play a key role in the Brave New Worlds of the Future. Fig 5: Artwork from China’s first ecological animation project: “Shanghai Super Kids,” supervised by Rolf Giesen (CUC Anima, Communication University of China Beijing) and Martin Zimper (The Zurich University of The Arts). Metropolis, City of the Dead 117 Works Cited Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. London: Studio Vista, 1967, Eisenschitz, Bernard, Paula Félix-Didier, Kristina Jaspers, and Martin Koerber. Fritz Langs Metropolis. ARTE Edition. Munich: belleville, 2010. Giesen, Rolf. “Die digitalen Welten der Moving Images.“ FKT: Die Fachzeitschrift für Fernsehen, Film und elektronische Medien. Berlin: Fachverlag Schiele & Schön, 2007. 11-13. Giesen, Rolf and Claudia Meglin. Künstliche Welten. Hamburg: Europa Verlag, 2000. Rickitt, Richard. Special Effects: The History and Technique. New York: Billboard Books, 2007. Vaz, Mark Cotta and Patricia Rose Duignan. Industrial Light & Magic: Into the Digital Realm. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. III. Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment S TEFAN L. B RANDT Open City, Closed Space: Metropolitan Aesthetics in American Literature from Brown to DeLillo 1 A traveler who has just left the walls of an immense city climbs the neighboring hill; […] he can no longer distinguish the public squares, and he can scarcely trace out the great thoroughfares; but his eye has less difficulty in following the boundaries of the city, and for the first time he sees the shape of the vast whole. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I (1835), 479-80. It occurred to me that the city might afford me an asylum. […] I had been there twice or thrice in my life, but only for a few hours each time. I knew not a human face, and was a stranger to its modes and dangers. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), 21. She told people she wanted to leave the city. […] They said, Leave the City? For what? To go where? It was the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York, loud and blunt, but she felt it in her heart no less than they did. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007), 85-87. 1 Introduction When the French historian and political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville set out to study prisonhouses in America in 1831, his actual goal was to scrutinize American democracy. Tocqueville’s findings, as he would later report in his two books De la Démocratie en Amerique (1835 and 1840), asserted a basic link between democratic culture and the modern correctional system. Nowhere does this intersection of the discourses of empowerment (democracy) and limitation (the penitentiary system) become more transparent than in Tocqueville’s portrayal of the American city. When he returned from his trip to the United States after less than two years, Tocqueville reasoned (in a chapter aptly titled “Principal Causes Maintaining the Democratic Republic”) that “America has no great capital city, whose influence is directly or indirectly felt over the whole extent of the country, which I hold to be one of the first 1 Parts of this essay have been published in Amerikastudien - American Studies 54.4 (2010): 553-581. I want to thank the editors for allowing me to republish these passages. S TEFAN L. B RANDT 122 causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the United States” (318-9, my italics). While insisting on the pivotal function of a “great capital city” for the implementation of democracy, Tocqueville also pointed out the potential dangers emanating from urban life. As he warningly added in a footnote, the emergence of large cities (such as Philadelphia and New York) 2 also advanced the formation of “serious riots” - some of them witnessed by Tocqueville himself. Such social tensions, he argued, signified a vital threat to the existence of democracy on American soil: I look upon the size of certain American cities, and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the New World; and I venture to predict that they will perish from this circumstance unless the government succeeds in creating an armed force, which […] will be independent of the town population, and able to repress its excesses. (319) The city - and the American city, in particular - has often been imagined in terms of the oppositional discourses discussed by Tocqueville. With the American Revolution taking place in the last decades of the 18 th century, one image became firmly embedded into the cultural imaginary: that of the Open City 3 which also functioned as closed space. While serving as beacons of democracy and progress, cities also functioned as pessimistic heralds of a possible collapse of cultural life. As Marxist critic Raymond Williams contends in his landmark study The Country and the City, urbanity has been invested since the arrival of the modern era with two sets of contradictory notions that have both strongly influenced the dominant image of cities. The positive side of this image consists of values such as civilization, cosmopolitanism, complexity, protection, light, and tolerance. The negative side refers to the counterconcepts of degeneration, anomie, violence, darkness, obscurity, and sin. This essay wants to show how these two sets of images were utilized in the dominant literary imagination of the United States as complementary, yet also intricately connected devices of representation. The ‘Open City’ of modernity and postmodernity, I will argue, is constructed as a hoax - a companion narrative to that of the labyrinthine city which continually builds up new borders to the inside and to the outside. The rhetoric of openness, as instrumental as it may have been in the literary practice of the American Renaissance - for example, in Walt Whitman’s odes to the cosmopolitanism of “Mannahatta” -, only masked the persistence of an aesthetics of closure which invested the concepts of urbanity with elements of over-determination and complexity projected onto the narrative structure of the labyrinth. The suggestion of ‘openness’ as part of the metropolitan aesthetics was fundamentally needed to make the narrative of the labyrinth operate on the level of per- 2 According to the data provided by Tocqueville in the first volume of his book, Philadelphia had 161,000 inhabitants and New York 202,000 in the year 1830 (318). 3 Since I am referring to the ‘Open City’ as a concept, I will use capital letters for the term. Open City, Closed Space 123 ception. This tactic becomes obvious in the postmodern imagination which sketches the cityscape as an ambiguous place: it invites the flâneur to follow the multitudinous promises of urban life, but also erects new boundaries that evoke the impression of ‘being locked.’ Edward W. Soja’s notion of the ‘expansive postmetropolis’ (the mega city built upon patterns of deterritorialization and productive conflation of experiential zones) is as central to my argument as Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotopic” imagination (a literary strategy which merges the levels of time and space in order to enable new forms of literary experience). These theoretical models help to understand what I call the “metropolitan aesthetics” of literary texts - their usage of urban border zones as markers of the symbolic intersection of ‘open space’ and ‘closed space.’ 2 From ‘Open City’ to ‘Postmetropolis’ It has been widely argued that the ‘Open City’ was a unique invention of the modern era (beginning with the Enlightenment and reaching its peak around the turn to the 20 th century). As a result of the challenges of industrialization and large waves of immigration during the 19 th century, American cities gradually changed their appearance. The metropolitan discourse began to adopt new modes of representation, answering to the altered needs, behaviors, and attitudes of people living in American cities and responding to the growing function that these urban centers had in the modern world (see Harding 1-30; Ickstadt 199-214). The image of the ‘Open City’ - as we know it today - was fabricated during the early years of the republic when writers began to discover the ‘pulsating city’ as an epitome of a prospering American nation. Philadelphia, for a long time, was regarded as the cosmopolitan city in America, harboring large numbers of immigrants from Europe and also giving shelter to many fugitive slaves. Next to Boston and New York City, Philadelphia was one of the centers of European immigration in the United States and a model of lively transcultural exchange (Warner 56-62). During the 1840s and 50s, it was New York City which assumed this role of a ‘nodal point’ of transatlantic encounters between Europe and the United States. Functioning as the center of what critics have called the ‘American Empire,’ New York City in the mid-19 th century epitomized the ideals of world citizenship and unrestricted flow of immigration (Berrol 39-74). Geographically as well as emotionally, American cities were increasingly perceived as synonyms of a New World Order that celebrated individualism and complexity instead of conformity and assimilation. Urban fiction at this time attempted to transcend established boundaries to form a potentially liberating vision of urban life (see Wheeler 1). The ‘Open City’ of the 19 th century was widely perceived as a countermodel to the ‘built’ reality of American urban space, reflecting an image of an ‘other’ America imagined by a group of progressive thinkers and writers. S TEFAN L. B RANDT 124 The utopian ideal of a heterogeneous, multi-faceted, and playful society, “a place where people witness and appreciate diverse cultural expressions” (Young 269), became an important rhetorical device in 19 th century U.S. literature. Functioning as “an arena in which diverse social and ethnic groups can coexist, interact, and generate complex relationships and networks” (K. Christiaanse, qtd. in: Armborst et al), the model of the ‘Open City’ was never more than an enticing fantasy, a bulwark against the sad realities of boundary maintenance and ghettoization. “City life as an openness to unassimilated otherness,” the late Urban Studies scholar Iris Marion Young explains, “represents only an unrealized social ideal” (251). In the 20 th century, the entrenchment of urban culture further increased, generating a gulf of exclusion in social and cultural practice. For Gerald E. Frug, the outcome of this development was the ‘divided city,’ which privileged the urban elite to the disadvantage of the lower classes: Neighborhood boundaries, city/ suburb boundaries, and the boundaries between suburbs have […] divided residents of metropolitan areas along class and ethnic lines. […] The overall impact of American urban policy in the twentieth century has thus been to disperse and divide the people who live in America’s metropolitan areas, and, as a result, to reduce the number of places where people encounter men and women different from themselves. (132, my italics) This politics of division has not only shaped the appearance of American cities, but also the self-image of individuals living in the city and the aesthetics of the urban imaginary. In his astute study of metropolitan America, Kenneth T. Jackson observes that those “invisible fences” which “surround entire municipal jurisdictions in the United States” are widely perceived “as real and effective as both the fortifications of Medieval Europe and the gated communities of our own time” (186). If the metropolitan areas of our day are indeed ‘fortress cities,’ as Mike Davis has convincingly shown in City of Quartz (with respect to Los Angeles), why are these cities still associated in the popular imagination with freedom and openness? One possible answer would be that the invisible walls erected in the urban landscape must be counterbalanced in the cultural imaginary by images of hopefulness and expansion. Davis’s Los Angeles may be experienced as a garrisoned place with bloated prisonhouses, guarded communities, and cruel street environments. Yet these urban frontiers also seem to bear the potential to evoke notions of transcendence and even hybridization. As sociologist Richard Sennett has contended in The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (1970), the mere existence of border zones suggests the possibility of their metamorphosis into livable areas, due to their inherently hybrid and transformative character. In his study, Sennett theorizes the prospect of a city which incorporates diversity, creative disorder, and even chaos into a functioning cultural practice. The ‘Open City’ envisioned here is a place which allows for anarchic places of self-empowerment and energetically rejects “the myth of a purified community” (27-49; 172-98). As Sennett Open City, Closed Space 125 cautions in a recent essay, we have to remain aware of the difference between ‘boundaries’ and ‘borders.’ While boundaries are conceived as limits which demarcate certain territories from others, borders (for example in natural eco systems) “are the zones in a habitat where organisms become more active, due to the meeting of different species or physical conditions” (“Public Realm” 265). Borders can thus be conceived as vital zones of transition. Openness, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean ‘lack of order,’ as Sennett clarifies: Openness can be planned, as in the flexible use of building materials like glass, in transport technologies as minute as the automated bollard, in the porosity of monumental buildings, or in access to natural resources like water. (op. cit. 271) Just as borders may enable, or even necessitate, a sense of permeability, open spaces may appear in the form of a constructed, ‘built’ fabric. 4 If, as Richard Sennett claims, the “basic principle of a closed system is over-determined form” (op. cit. 263), even the ‘Open City’ can be conceptualized as ‘closed’ as far its aesthetic structure is concerned. According to Sennett, the ‘overdetermination’ of closed systems articulates itself in the form of two correlated axioms: equilibrium and integration. In order to counterbalance the arising energies produced by the state of closure, a given system may unintentionally set processes into motion which fundamentally alter its inner structure and lead to its explosion, or implosion. In other words: a seemingly closed system may evoke its own deconstruction, by virtue of the explosive energies generated through the state of closure. The concept of ‘postmetropolis,’ developed by political geographer Edward W. Soja, is particularly useful to understand the symbolic nexus of open and closed spaces. The term defines the heterogeneous mega city of the postmodern age - a place in which urban space has increasingly become exteriorized. 5 The postmodern metropolis, Soja contends, is spatially organized through strategies of fragmentation, dislocation, and decentering. Cul- 4 City planner August Heckscher has shown in Open Spaces: The Life of American Cities (1977) that U.S. urban areas (with the examples of Omaha, Dallas, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Milwaukee) are fundamentally based upon a “desire for openness” (17). “The town in America, as soon as it could dispense with the stockade and exist with reasonable security, showed a liking for open vistas and an uncomplicated structural form” (17-18). 5 Following Soja, the ‘postmetropolis’ is represented by six intersected discourses: ‘flexcity,’ ‘cosmopolis,’ ‘exopolis,’ ‘metropolarities,’ ‘carceral archipelagoes,’ and ‘simcities.’ ‘Flexcity’ refers to the highly specialized post-Fordist metropolis of the industrial era; ‘cosmopolis’ relates to the effects of globalization and the formation of new hierarchies; ‘exopolis’ emphasizes the appearance of edge cities and outer cities from a former inner core; ‘metropolarities’ revolve around the emergence of new polarities and the restructuring of the social fabric; ‘carceral archipelagoes’ can be found in Davis’s concept of the “city of quartz” or “fortified city,” e.g., Detroit and Los Angeles; ‘simcities’ can be found in hyperreality and the culture of simulacra, for example, in cyberspace. These models, Soja claims, signal the continuous transformation of the urban imaginary “from the modern metropolis to the expansive postmetropolis” - a development characterized by Soja as “postmetropolitan transition” (Postmetropolis 4). S TEFAN L. B RANDT 126 tural practice in the ‘postmetropolis’ is enacted as performance; the tactile fabric of this city is constructed as surface - as a mirror image of the mental constitution of its inhabitants, reflecting feelings of confusion and reversal of experiential spaces. The ‘postmetropolis’ has become a hyperreal site of detours and impasses, evoking the impression of inner depth through staged images. The postmetropolitan imaginary, Soja contends, is inextricably linked to “our mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces, and communities in which we live” (Postmetropolis 324). The postmetropolis thus operates as a marketplace of ever-shifting borders and identities through which American cultural identity is defined, challenged, and, then again, reinscribed: Postfordist economic restructuring, intensified globalization, […], and many other forces shaping the postmetropolitan transition have significantly reconfigured our urban imaginary, blurring its once much clearer boundaries and meanings while also creating new ways of thinking and acting in the urban milieu. (ibid.) I will try to show in the following that this ‘blurring of once much clearer boundaries’ not only defines the functioning of a ‘postmetropolitan’ rhetoric, but lies at the heart of the American urban imaginary itself. Such patterns of boundary confusion can be found in the metaphoric play between open and closed spaces in dominant city fiction. Literary texts, I shall argue, stage the border spheres of the city as counterdiscourses to the increasing tendencies of reification and materialization. The “Post Urbanism” (Kelbaugh) 6 or “New Metropolitanism” (Bender) 7 negotiated in postmodern texts offers a radically new version of urban experience, confronting the reader with the unparalleled challenges but also the - seemingly - endless possibilities of city life. In Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007), the character Lianne, a 9/ 11 survivor’s estranged wife, is staged as a border character. In a desperate attempt to cope with the trauma of September 11, Lianne has become extremely sensitive, responding to any ‘invasion’ of her private sphere with unusual vigor. At one point, she feels disturbed by a neighbor listening to music during the day. When the neighbor rejects her complaint, calling her “ultrasensitive,” she exclaims, “The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding? ” (151). Lianne’s statement suggests that to be exposed to the city also means to internalize the city’s sensory patterns. Metaphorically speaking, Lianne has become the city. The character’s vulnerability to external 6 Kelbaugh defines “Post Urbanism” as a “heterotopian, sensational, and poststructuralist” project within the deconstructionist discourse which communicates postmodern sensibilities and underlines the technological aspects of globalization (133-80; 167). 7 According to Thomas Bender, “New Metropolitanism” can be defined, first, by an explosive ‘urban sprawl’ and, second, by the expansive creation of new ‘local publics.’ Like the related phenomenon of “New Urbanism,” he holds, it shares “more than is acknowledged with the modernist urbanism to which it is supposed to be an alternative” (55-56). Open City, Closed Space 127 influences, DeLillo’s novel asserts, must be seen as a response to postmodern urban culture which has become unbearably intense after 9/ 11. The hypersensitive practice of the postmodern metropolis, in this case New York City, leaves its inhabitants no choice but to engage in the city’s jerky rhythms, to become part of its all-encompassing dynamics. I want to suggest the phrase “reversal of experiential fields” to designate this form of interiorized urban space. “The American city,” Mike Davis explains in City of Quartz, “is being systematically turned inside out - or, rather, outside in” (226). The result of this process, Davis argues, is a “destruction of accessible public space” and, consequently, an incorporation of the street environment (ibid.). Davis’s observation explains why elements of city life, particularly the sounds produced by the streets, keep entering the psyche of urban dwellers. Jonathan Safran Foer’s experimental novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) already carries the conflation of exterior and interior space in its title. The novel’s characters, all of them trying to cope with the traumata of 9/ 11, seem filled with the sounds of the city - to the extent that this urban noise no longer operates as an external force, but is actually inside of them. 8 The individuals in urban fiction are literally haunted by the noise of the city. Both in Foer’s Extremely Loud and DeLillo’s Falling Man, the urban soundscape is perceived as a constant threat, unremittingly invading the private sphere. Even when the protagonists become detached from the actual noise of city streets, the signifiers of this noise are still haunting them. The loss of a stable center in urban fiction signals the climax of a long experiential process, in the course of which city space shifted its focus to the periphery. The ‘Open City’ of modernism is a place of transition, establishing the transitory zones of urban space as the definite markers of metropolitanism. The impressionistic setting of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) - a novel which, like hardly any other, has inspired discussions regarding American urban literature 9 - draws our attention to isolated experiences of urban life, which form what seems to be the ‘body of the city’ (and, at the same time, the body of the protagonist). Metropolitan aesthetics in Dos Passos, I will argue, seems built upon a logic of inversion of spaces. One of the main characters, Bud Korpenning, moves to the city from the countryside to find work, but eventually commits suicide after almost starving to death. Another character, Ellen Thatcher Oglethorpe, finds her way from the lower middle class to the upper class, ending up as an actress, successful but unhappy (like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie a quarter of a century before). The emphasis on border situations is further accentuated by the fact that Ellen changes her name frequently and even marries a gay man at one point. 10 8 In Don DeLillo’s first major novel White Noise, the concept of “panasonic” (meaning “all is sound”) is used to illustrate the pervasiveness of noise in modern city life (239-41). 9 See Gersdorf’s discussion of Manhattan Transfer in this book (30-31); cf. Dallmann, ConspiraCity New York (73-85). 10 Manhattan Transfer seems strongly influenced by a naturalist aesthetics which informs the construction of the city as ‘boundary space.’ It has been argued that the novel is per- S TEFAN L. B RANDT 128 Dos Passos’s murky vision of New York is a perverse countermodel to Whitman’s ‘Open City’ with its happy immigrants and citizens. “The literary Open City of the twentieth century,” one urban studies scholar explains, “descends from Walt Whitman’s literary Open City of the nineteenth” (Wheeler 194). Whitman’s celebration of the lively, vibrant city in his 1855 collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, functioned as a harbinger of a ‘free society’ which welcomed immigrants from places all over the world. Modernist fiction in many ways reversed the urban dynamic negotiated in Leaves of Grass. Whereas in Whitman’s verses the city is freely accessible to people from other countries, Dos Passos depicts this fluctuation as a painful process of ‘bleeding out.’ While Whitman’s “Mannahatta” celebrates the “immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week” (216), Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer portrays the travelers at the ports of New York as “deportees,” many of them convicted as communists by the Department of Justice (262-3). The “numberless, crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies” in Whitman’s poem (216), are contrasted in Dos Passos’s novel with images of “gorillafaced chipontheshoulder policemen” (263) and seagulls wheeling “above the dark dingydressed crowd that stood silently looking down the bay” (ibid.). The flux of people streaming into the city in Whitman’s verses is replaced in Dos Passos by a ghastly scenario of expulsion. The struggling immigrants are no happy daydreamers but “undesirable aliens” (ibid.). Although the gates are seemingly open in Dos Passos’s New York, the “transfer” depicted is rather one from inside to outside, never reaching the heart of the city, that enigmatic “center of things” (16). Towards the end of the novel, Jimmy Herf leaves the island of Manhattan on a ferry (just as he has entered the city on a boat), now destitute and deprived of his hopes and illusions. The metropolis of New York is portrayed as a shrinking moloch which loses its inhabitants either by death or by eviction. Only a bunch of rich ‘power brokers’ seem to occupy the space inside this metropolis. Like Stephen Crane in his naturalist novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) (which is also set near Bowery Street in New York City), Dos Passos plays with the notion of the city as apparently closed space. Manhattan Transfer’s metropolis is full of abysses, class hierarchies and impasses that hinder the protagonists from actually ‘making it.’ 11 vaded by “a block of determinist, naturalist narrative” that runs “beneath an accelerated, yearning impressionism” (Brooker, New York Fictions 53). In Manhattan Transfer’s plot, this determinist discourse is manifested through the erection of borders and dead-ends which hinder the characters’ movements and often lead them into a fatal direction. 11 For Blanche Housman Gelfant, the character Jimmy Herf in Manhattan Transfer is the modernist prototype of the “self-divided man” (21). Having become alienated from his environment, Jimmy desperately explores the urban jungle in search for gratification. Open City, Closed Space 129 3 Metropolitan Aesthetics and the City Labyrinth In his influential study The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch has described the modern metropolis as an “alienated city,” in which the inhabitants have become unable to find orientation. Since traditional indicators such as natural boundaries, monuments, and traffic knots are rendered obsolete or interchangeable (Jersey City being the most blatant example), people can no longer create a mental map of either their own position or the overarching urban space in which they live (25-32). The encoding of the city takes place in the form of a language game. It forms urban identity as a structural web, comparable to the famous ‘grid’ of New York City with its squares and blocks (Trabant 79-88). Each quarter in this model city has its own laws which constitute identity and shape ways of behavior. Accordingly, there is a multitude of identities, all of them existing at the same time and struggling for dominion. “What makes this city postmodern,” John Williams contends, “is that there is no way of avoiding these conflicts between quarters” (28). The postmodern city is based upon notions of heterogeneity and diversity. It points to the unfading possibilities of urban cultural practice but also to its restrictions. It is both an ‘Open City,’ encouraging the transcendence of boundaries and the creation of zones of hybridity, and a ‘closed space,’ confronting the urban dweller with limitations, detours, and dead-ends. The circulation of these contradictory notions of openness and closure in city culture is linked to what Henri Lefebvre has described, in his 1991 book by the same title, as “the production of space.” Following Lefebvre, space can be subjectively experienced as well as empirically categorized and analyzed. It may assume form as an “affective space” filled with mythology and emotion but also as a “rational space” to be found in the various modes of spatial practice, e.g., the division of labor, the social diversification of age groups and genders, and the material production of a social infrastructure (houses, roads, and cities). A characteristic expression of this collision of spaces is the metaphor of the city as labyrinth. The maze is, first of all, an ideological construction, designed to impose a system of power onto all members of society. Second, it is also a mode of spatialization of everyday life, connected to the futile attempts of individuals to map their environment (Soja, Postmodern Geographies 17-21). In urban writing, the labyrinth serves at once as an iconic representation and as a structuring pattern. As a textualized image, it may also assume the function of a metaliterary event, commenting on the act of text production itself. Through the metaphor of the urban maze we are confronted with the mechanisms of writing and become aware of our own difficulty in accessing and comprehending fictional texts. 12 12 For a discussion of the ‘city as labyrinth,’ see Wendy B. Faris’s essay “The Labyrinth as Sign” (1991) and Peter F. Smith’s classical study The Syntax of Cities (1977, 171). S TEFAN L. B RANDT 130 Notably, Paul Auster begins his “City of Glass” (1985) - the first part of The New York Trilogy - with a detailed portrayal of the labyrinthine character of America’s archetypal metropolis: “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhood and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost” (3-4). Not only does Auster’s detective hero Quinn ‘lose himself’ in the maze of buildings and streets. The reader as well becomes lost in the labyrinth of the text. The structural analogy between protagonist and reader is firmly grounded in the aesthetic design of Auster’s novel. To achieve this aim, Auster uses a number of intertextual references to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and later to Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838). In Poe’s short story, which is also narrated from the first-person perspective, an unnamed character strays through the streets of London, observing the diverse types of city dwellers. Not coincidentally, the first (and last) sentence of “The Man of the Crowd” cites “a certain German book” which “does not permit itself to be read” (475). When the narrator’s attention is attracted by a “decrepit old man” (478) with an idiosyncratic expression on his face, he follows the stranger, suspecting him of having committed an atrocious crime. All indications that the old man is actually a criminal, confirmed by a diamond and a dagger the man seems to carry under his suit, are in the course of events revealed as figments of the protagonist’s imagination. As the restless protagonist embarks on an ultimately fruitless journey through the city streets, following the mysterious “man of the crowd,” the reader as well attempts to detect the mystery. The reader’s endeavor, like the protagonist’s, has to end in frustration, since the text resists any form of cogent interpretation. 13 The mindless search of Poe’s protagonist, one critic observes, is constructed as a pre-Freudian investigation into the human mind. If one reads the narrator and the man of the crowd as the two elements of the split self, the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’, then the nightly wanderings in the dark streets of London become an externalized image, and a textual manifestation, of the mental process. (Varvogli 66) Poe’s analogy between the architectural organization of the urban maze and the structure of the human Unconscious is reintroduced by many postmodern narratives. When the first-person narrator in Auster’s “The Locked Room” (1986), 14 notably an unnamed writer living in New York City, tries to 13 Towards the end of the tale, the first-person narrator claims to have verified that the old man is indeed “the type and the genius of deep crime” (481). Yet, he decides it would be useless to continue the pursuit since there is no way of solving the riddle. Like a book, the mysterious stranger ‘refuses to be read.’ The final words, reiterated from the beginning of the tale - “er lässt sich nicht lesen” (ibid.) - may refer to both the book mentioned shortly before (Hortulus Animae by German compositor Hans Grüninger) and the old man, who appears in the male German pronoun ‘er.’ Both seem inscrutable. 14 “The Locked Room” constitutes the third part of Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Open City, Closed Space 131 picture his vanished childhood friend Fanshawe, he has only “one impoverished image” in mind: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude - living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull. (293) Similar to our Unconscious, which alters its own structure in order to elude attempts of interpretation, the fictional city encourages us to trespass boundaries and explore new realms of experience. The urban labyrinth offers the flâneur an enigmatic assemblage of indecipherable signs. Looking at Manhattan from the 110 th floor of the World Trade Center, “the tallest letters of the world,” Michel de Certeau ponders over the hidden rhetoric of the modern metropolis which constructs its buildings in the form of narratives (127). The complexity of the city, de Certeau argues, is turned into a panorama of signs that offers the observer a vast number of different reading options. The only way of exploring the city is to perambulate it. The ordinary practitioners of the city walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of the urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. (de Certeau 128) The urban dweller’s “walking rhetorics,” as de Certeau calls it (131), becomes a strategy of decoding the ramified space of the city: The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrases’ or ‘stylistic figures’. There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours). (ibid.) Based in the semiotic field of modern urbanity, the “rhetoric of walking” facilitates the conflation of geography, textuality, and imagination into one experience: that of the city itself. The urban flâneur is both an explorer and a creator of city space, remodeling established lines and structures. 15 The reconstruction of urban space through the figure of the walker, I shall argue, lies at the heart of the American urban imaginary. The typical hero of American city fiction trespasses the segmented spaces of the city only to discover that the greater whole is a “locked room” - in some cases even literally, as Auster’s New York Trilogy illustrates. In order to illustrate this continuity from the post-revolutionary epoch to postmodernity, I want to draw attention to Charles Brockden Brown’s early city novel, Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Published in two parts in the years 1799 and 1800, Arthur Mervyn is set in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic. The main character is an eighteen-year-old boy from 15 Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished fragments called Das Passagen-Werk (written between 1927 & 1940 and posthumously published as The Arcades Project) has argued that the flâneur is an ‘archaeologist of the streets.’ Cityscape is experienced by the flâneur as a “colportage of space” - a place loaded with history and ideology. “Space winks at the flâneur, ‘What do you think may have gone on here? ’” (418-419). S TEFAN L. B RANDT 132 the country who has moved to Philadelphia to earn a living. 16 Arthur Mervyn experiences his trip through the city as a series of meanders, detours, and impasses which lead him, time and again, to high walls and empty houses. When Arthur has finally managed to overcome all these hindrances, he is awaited by sheer darkness, as the following scene illustrates: “We arrived at a brick wall, through which we passed by a gate into an extensive court or yard. The darkness would allow me to see nothing but outlines” (I: 35). At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist is robbed of his money and ends up on a courtyard where he is deprived of his sight by darkness and other buildings. His next station is a domicile in which he hides, a bedroom, and - as a climax of this chain of events - a bedroom closet into which he finds himself confined. “What a condition was mine! Immersed in palpable darkness! shut up in this unknown recess! lurking like a robber! ” (I: 38). In passages like this, Brown anticipates Edgar Allan Poe’s grim visions of being immured and buried alive. As if mysteriously attracted by such claustrophobic spaces, the character keeps stumbling into one dead-end after another. “I stepped into the closet, and closed the door. Some one [sic] immediately after unlocked the chamber door” (ibid.). Before Arthur actually steps into the closet, which will become his temporary grave, he ponders the advantages and disadvantages of such a leap into the unknown: Should I immure myself in this closet? I saw no benefit that would finally result from it. I discovered that there was a bolt on the inside, which would somewhat contribute to security. This being drawn, no one could enter without breaking the door. (I: 38) Closed rooms, Arthur Mervyn’s first-person narrator concludes, offer a sense of protection and inner peace, given the fact that they can be locked. Notably, Brown in the passage above operates with images of both “opening up” (doors) and “closing” (bolts, closets), suggesting that the city of Philadelphia as the location of Arthur’s odyssey consists of many segmented spaces. These spaces seem literally ‘interlocked’ through areas of transition which either enable the walker to find his way into the open or lead to his incarceration. 17 16 To what extent the yellow fever epidemics of the late 18 th century - in urban centers like New York and Philadelphia - had blemished the reputation of cities, is illustrated in a letter Thomas Jefferson, then Vice President of the United States, sent to the renowned physician Benjamin Rush on September 23, 1800: “The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of mankind” (“Evil Effects” 462). 17 The first part of Arthur Mervyn is full of references to the character’s attempts to break out of the boundaries of the city. Early into his odyssey, the narrator tells us: “I had formed the resolution to leave the city next day, and was astonished at the folly that had led me into it” (I: 29; cf. I: 47). When Arthur finally manages to escape, he is soon drawn back, magically, to what he calls the “heart of the city” (I: 140; cf. II: 77). These erratic excursions in and out of the limits of the city describe a symbolic space which is essentially inescapable. Even though Arthur does finally move to the country to marry Achsa Fielding, his final decision is to cross yet another boundary line and “hie to Europe”(II: 230). Open City, Closed Space 133 As if to underline this interplay of breaking free and imprisonment, Arthur’s movements through the city are marked by a circular route that scratches on the city’s borders but then throws him back again to his lonely chamber: After viewing various parts of the city, intruding into churches, and diving into alleys, I returned. The rest of the day I spent chiefly in my chamber, reflecting on my new condition; surveying my apartment, its presses and closets; and conjecturing the causes of appearances. (I: 62) Arthur Mervyn’s world is marked as a territory of closets and closed rooms. Even when Arthur eventually steps outside and wanders through the city, he usually ends up in his chamber and “surveys” his apartment. The labyrinthine character of the metropolis is underlined by references to a convoluted network of streets, buildings, and yards, sometimes evoking the image of Davis’s “fortified city”: “The doors communicating with the court, and, through the court, with the street, were fastened by inside bolts” (I: 215). Brown’s Philadelphia is truly a fortress, equipped with a massive bulwark to protect what seems to be the inner core of the city. Yet Arthur manages to pervade these lines of defense when he first arrives at the city limits. It is part of Brown’s metropolitan aesthetics that he portrays the metropolis as an essentially closed space with only a few - often hidden or locked - entrances. In Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Brown’s companion text to Arthur Mervyn, 18 the city of Philadelphia appears metaphorically in the form of a trunk in a secluded house in the woods. This trunk has keys to it, but no keyholes. When Edgar breaks it open with eagerness, he discovers an amazing setting: The space within was divided into numerous compartments, none of which contained any thing of moment. Tools of different and curious constructions, and remnants of minute machinery, were all that offered themselves to my notice. (113) The labyrinthine interior of the box as well as the “minute machinery” contained in it are placed in analogy to the urban maze of Philadelphia. While set in a vast territory in the badlands of Pennsylvania (in a region called “Norwalk”), Edgar Huntly needs references to the city to design its allegorical space. When Edgar traces Clithero’s manuscripts in a little cottage, he immediately falls into a habit of confining himself into a locked space: “I bolted the door, and, drawing near the light, opened and began to read” (115). And a few lines later Edgar falls into a mysterious pit whose high walls are reminiscent of the barriers that his literary alter ego Arthur Mervyn has to fight against. 18 Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker was published right between the two parts of Arthur Mervyn in August, 1799. The first part of Arthur Mervyn appeared in May, 1799, the second part more than a year later, in September, 1800. This chronology is particularly interesting, since it generates the impression that Edgar Huntly is an ‘enframed’ text, informed by both the “catastrophic” urbanity in the first part of Arthur Mervyn and the symbolic return to rural life in the novel’s second part. On the theme of boundary transgression which can be classified as a key theme in both novels, see Watts (115). S TEFAN L. B RANDT 134 The sides of this pit were inaccessible; human footsteps would never wander into these recesses. My friends were unapprized of my forlorn state. Here I should continue till wasted by famine. In this grave should I linger out a few days in unspeakable agonies, and then perish forever. (156) The claustrophobic states of mind described in Edgar Huntly evoke the shadowy projections of the expanding urban centers in the late 18 th century. The ‘urban jungle’ in Arthur Mervyn, charged with images of disease, battle, and corruption, is replaced in Edgar Huntly by the natural jungle, including a panther and a bunch of Indians, all of whom Edgar slaughters with a tomahawk. Just like Arthur Mervyn almost perishes from the yellow fever in Philadelphia, Edgar is close to dying in the wilderness, first from starvation, later from the attacks of the panther in the pit. The space of the pit here emerges as mirror image to the space of the city. Both spatial fields equally threaten to overwhelm their inhabitants. The image of the “verge of the pit” (155), on which Edgar finds himself, evokes that of the urban abyss (and the “people of the abyss”) created by Jack London over one hundred years later. 19 4 Urban Space after 9/ 11 and the Chronotopic Imagination The very first lines of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man introduce a veritably apocalyptic scenario: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night” (3, my italics). Interestingly enough, DeLillo uses the terms ‘time’ and ‘space’ as synonyms to describe the cataclysmic state of a ‘city lying in ruins.’ Moreover, time and space are deployed as signifiers of an even larger place - the “world.” The space of the city is expanded in this opening passage to encompass a global trauma, an impression matching a common phrase in the days and weeks after 9/ 11 that the grief and shock of Americans was actually shared by citizens across the globe. The urban space of New York City post-9/ 11 is established in Falling Man as a nightmarish place (topos) uncannily extended by the dimension of time (chronos). The concept of ‘timespace’ seems embedded in the novel into the lasting trauma of the terrorist attacks burnt into the post-apocalyptic imagination like napalm - an imagination inspired by and accompanied with the melancholic tunes of Irish folk singer Enya’s number one hit “Only Time.” Just as “Only Time” became something of a background score to the upsetting images of the terrorist attacks and the victims’ sufferings, the idea of 19 A similar image is evoked in Auster’s The New York Trilogy, where the ‘Big Apple’ is described as “the most forlorn of places, the most abject” (78). Not unlike Brown’s Philadelphia, Auster’s New York is a devastated city, full of detours, dead-end streets, and wrecked individuals. “The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap” (78). The apocalyptic metropolis of Auster’s following novel, In the Country of Last Things, resembles Arthur Mervyn’s sick city even more. It is a place of slaughterhouses, wrecked homeless shelters, and crematoria. The main task of the police is to pick up the corpses lying in the streets (17). Open City, Closed Space 135 ‘time’ itself was turned into an iconic image of 9/ 11. This idea of time became transfixed in slow-motion clips shown on CNN and pictures like that of the famous ‘falling man,’ the title-giving figure of DeLillo’s novel. Time seems literally frozen in these shots. The ‘falling man’ is reduced in such pictures - and in DeLillo’s novel - to his most recognizable features caught by unsteady cam shots and displayed on mainstream television: his shirt - a sight which clearly shocks the protagonist of Falling Man, 39-year-old lawyer Keith Neudecker: “[H]e saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in his life” (316). This climactic moment, personified by the tragic figure of the ‘jumper,’ is linked throughout the novel to the performance act of an artist whom Keith’s wife keeps seeing in various areas of the city. As I will argue in the following, the concept of time is merged in DeLillo’s and Foer’s novels with space, giving rise to the formation of visceral images of intense shock and trauma. The time and place portrayed in the ‘falling man’ pictures seems to reject the notions of finiteness and limitation. The time frame of the images captures a body still alive but about to be shattered on the ground. Likewise, the space shown is somewhere ‘inbetween’, flanked by heaven and earth, in midair, and thus beyond death. 20 The concept of the chronotope developed by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin can help to understand the dynamic which underlies such visual strategies. Defined by Bakhtin as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” the chronotope - literally: timespace - is grounded in the “collective historical life” shared by the members of a community at a given point in time (The Dialogic Imagination 84, 208). Through the fictionalization of this moment, Bakhtin argues, particularly dramatic events become more accessible and manageable. In another work, Bakhtin suggests that, with the literary figure of the chronotope, historical time becomes “condensed in space” (Speech Genres 49). The chronotope thus enables readers to cope with previously unfathomable and threatening events, in other words, to make them comprehensible. However, since there is not only one perception of the events surrounding 9/ 11, but multitudinous vantage points, we can speak of a 20 Post-9/ 11 fiction here reiterates a pattern which was already utilized in classical realism and modernism - that of time reactivated through its fusion with space. “In many realist and modernist novels,” Bart Keunen argues, “the image of the protagonist arriving in the big city is created through descriptions of urban space that contextualize the (temporal) process of the encounter with the metropolis” (421). This ‘chronotopic’ visualization of the city becomes especially relevant in neo-realism and postmodernism where notions of fragmented or disrupted time are blended with notions of dislocation and loss of orientation. In Extremely Loud, this sense of disorientation is linked to the location of Central Park, which, like hardly any other place in New York City, symbolizes metropolitan space as a lived space. “I spent all day walking around in the park,” the first-person narrator tells us, “looking for something that might tell me something, but the problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for” (8). Typically, 9/ 11 texts focus on the spatial gap generated by 9/ 11 - a gap that the traumatized city dweller living “in the shadow of no towers,” as Art Spiegelman phrased it in his eponymous work, has to fill. S TEFAN L. B RANDT 136 “polychronotopic” imaginary, using a terminology coined by Lynne Pearce in her study Reading Dialogics. Hereby, Pearce defines the possible coexistence of multiple ‘timespaces’ within the same literary text (174). Postmodern and neo-realist texts, in particular, lend themselves to a Bakhtinian reading. The centrality of multiple, interconnected perspectives to the postmodern aesthetics encourages the usage of concepts such as polychronotopicity and heteroglossia. For example, DeLillo, in Falling Man, employs techniques of polychronotopicity by introducing tropes which imply a conflation of the temporal and the spatial dimension. Like Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer, DeLillo utilizes an impressionistic approach that emphasizes isolated events connected to ‘lived’ urban space. The trauma of 9/ 11 becomes visible, even tangible, in Falling Man in the form of hysterical scenes on fire escapes and jam-packed shafts. The notion of ‘being locked’ associated with such places is used to evoke a setting of sheer terror: “The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors” (69). Emphasis is placed here on the combination of a symbolic place - the stairwell which served as a last escape to many imprisoned in the burning Twin Towers - and the aspect of time - the fact that these vital escape routes have become unbearably slow with other persons still coming in. Another important chronotope is constructed with respect to the area immediately surrounding the World Trade Center, with the towers just about to collapse: “[A] man came out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face” (109). In such short vignettes, Falling Man illustrates the force of terror experienced by the characters. DeLillo scatters these brief scenes all through his text without ever elaborating on them in detail. The short sentence, “His car hit a wall” (114) is followed by a rather banal interior monologue held by Keith’s mother who puts the blame on her son’s mistress Florence - another 9/ 11 survivor, who, as she thinks, has destroyed his marriage to Lianne. Foer, in Extremely Loud, finds numerous images where place (the events of September 11) and time (the urge to forget and cope with the trauma) coincide. Written from the unreliable point of view of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, the novel interlaces various historical events - for instance, the bombing of Dresden and the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11 - with images of ‘place.’ The novel’s protagonist has lost his father in the attacks of 9/ 11, an event which he finds hard to handle or even fully realize. Isolated lines such as “Start spreading the news” (22) ironically refer to a cheerful image of New York City (that of Frank Sinatra’s famous hymn) which has been temporarily invalidated. The iconic images of the “old New York” seem to be inconsistent with the new one. Oskar’s obsession with numbers (like the cryptic “googolplex,” the number 1 followed by 10 100 zeros) indicates a desire to pin down the terrible events in the form of data and thus make them manageable (35). Significant- Open City, Closed Space 137 ly, Oskar is also preoccupied with British physicist Stephen Hawking, and particularly with his work A Brief History of Time (86). 21 In the final images of the novel, time seems to stand still, appearing almost ‘frozen’ in the form of an image sequence of the ‘falling man.’ 22 Oskar removes these well-known images, depicting a man jumping from a tower shortly before its collapse, from his private diary (called Stuff That Happened to Me) and carefully arranges them as a flip-book, but in reverse order. Looking at the images in his own journal, Oskar begins to see the body flying up to the sky instead of falling to the ground. “When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window back into the building” (325). Through the act of rewinding the actual course of events in his private photo book, Oskar resists the attempt to forget. He decides to access the past through the performance of visually rearranging its chronological order. Foer actually utilizes the iconic images of the ‘falling man’ as the final fifteen pages of his book, thus “bringing their cinematic temporality to the reader’s own fingertips and making the novel performatively coextensive with Oskar’s journal” (Huehls 43). Oskar’s spatio-temporal lifeworld thus also becomes our own, offering us a vision of rereading history and integrating the space of the past into that of the present. More intensely than other postmodern or neo-realist texts, especially those created before 9/ 11, Extremely Loud puts emphasis on the dimension of physical experience, aiming at a haptic and visual involvement of the reader. Through his decision to recreate an “imaginary timespace” based in the realm of the past, Oskar gains a sense of control over his body and, paradoxically, also over his own future. 23 The same sense of a rejection of time as a firm category is negotiated in Auster’s 9/ 11 novel The Brooklyn Follies (2005). Here, 60-year-old cancer patient Paul Glass returns to Brooklyn to find “a quiet place to die” (1). Brought 21 Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988), a bestseller in the late Eighties and recently reedited in an abridged version (together with Leonard Mlodinov), has since been marketed as an attempt to explain to a mainstream audience the laws of cosmology, referring to subjects such as the Big Bang and Black Holes. One of its famous passages deals with the distinction between “real time” and “imaginary time” (Brief History 138-9), an issue also negotiated in Foer’s novel. “[I]n imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like” (139). 22 Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), has argued that photographic illustrations of traumatic events have a more powerful effect upon us than, for example, movies or streaming clips. “[W]hen it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freezeframes: its basic unit is the single image” (22, my italics). In Foer’s novel, this petrification - what Sontag calls “freezeframing” - is suspended and transferred into cinematic motion, experienced by the readers themselves as they browse through the images. 23 Not coincidentally, the cover image for the first hardcover edition of Foer’s 9/ 11 novel, published by Houghton Mifflin, shows a human hand into which the words of the title are inscribed. S TEFAN L. B RANDT 138 to the hospital by paramedics and “hooked up to a heart monitor” (298), he realizes that you “become the person who inhabits your body, and what you are now is the sum total of that body’s failures” (299). This body is now perceived by the protagonist as a crossroads of events and internal processes, not unlike the city in which he lives. These experiences entirely change the character’s perception of his environment. As the boundaries between internal and external processes begin to blur, the sense of reality shifts from the environment into the inner core of the body: “Nothing felt real to me except my own body” (ibid.). When Paul is released from the hospital, having been told that he will not die, it is “eight o’ clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 - just forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center” (306). At first glance, the exact usage of timelines in this passage seems to evoke a concrete sense of history. Yet, by leaving out any reference to the following trauma of 9/ 11, the historical dimension is omitted from the plot, causing the protagonist to feel “as happy as any man who had ever lived” (ibid.). In the postmetropolis of New York, there seems to be no fixed past - just present and future. Hence, Michel de Certeau characterizes the ‘Big Apple’ as a place that has never managed to deal with its history: “New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour” (127). In Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, we become actively involved in the redefinition of history which emerges as an arbitrary, yet finally controllable event. Like Oskar, the readers of the novel pick up traces of the past - a key that does not seem to fit in any keyhole (note the parallel to Brown’s trope of the missing keyhole in Edgar Huntly) and a set of mysterious tape recordings. Oskar’s trauma is our trauma as well. His naïve belief that the world is ‘one big city’ is shared by us. The dread of forgetting becomes vividly acute in Extremely Loud, culminating in the comic reference to an elephant - a reference illustrated by a close-up image of the animal’s eye (94-95). The novel’s last sentence, “We would have been safe” (326), notably phrased in the past conditional tense, appeals to our desire to go back in time. The concept of ‘altered time’ is already negotiated in Paul Auster’s pre- 9/ 11 book In the Country of Last Things (1987). The novel is composed in the form of a long letter written by the protagonist Anna Blume who searches for her brother in a mysterious, destroyed city. Like Quinn in The New York Trilogy, Anna has a tendency of losing herself in the urban labyrinth. “Nothing lasts,” she tells us, “not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn’t waste your time looking for them” (2). The groundwork of this nightmare city is changing every day, confronting Anna with ever new problems and challenges. It is a divided city which constantly erects new fences and boundaries: Wherever buildings have fallen or garbage has gathered, large mounds stand in the middle of the street, blocking all passage. Men build these barricades whenever the materials are at hand, and they mount them, with clubs, or rifles, or bricks, and wait on their perches for people to pass by. They are in control of the street. (6) Open City, Closed Space 139 Anna begins to realize that in order to survive “you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse” (6). What Anna is so afraid of is the fact that the city is literally eating itself up, mercilessly eliminating its inhabitants’ energies and existence. “Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever” (87). To underline this notion of sickness and loss of stable structures, the novel makes use of cannibalistic imagery: “In order to live, you must make yourself die” (20). These self-destructive processes by which the inhabitants of the city are gripped are only symptoms of a much larger development: “Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains” (21-22). The image conjured up is that of a metropolis devouring its own intestines. Instead of expanding, this city is gradually shrinking. Auster’s apocalyptic scenario shows not only humans affected by this impulse but also language itself. “The words get smaller and smaller, so small that perhaps they are not even legible anymore” (183). The shrinking city produces individuals who either waste their energies aggressively by joining so-called “Assassination Clubs” (14) or become introverted like Anna. While telling us in the beginning of the novel how much she likes to “walk through the city” (5), the narrator concludes her story by stating: “I have lost the habit of the streets now, and excursions have become a great strain on me” (184). Anna’s tendency to reject things of the past and her refusal to continue “the habit of the streets” illustrate the nexus of chronos and topos in American city fiction. In postmodern and neo-realist writing, the temporal and the spatial dimension are entwined to form an apocalyptic timespace commenting on historical events such as the Cold War or 9/ 11. 5 Conclusion In this essay, I have put forward the argument that the ambiguous trope of the ‘Open City as closed space’ runs through American literature, with necessary adaptations to the respective socio-historical and aesthetic context, from the revolutionary period to postmodernity and neo-realism. One explanation for the remarkable nexus of ‘openness’ and ‘closure’ within the symbolic field of ‘the city’ can be found in the cultural desire for a balance between ‘empowerment’ and ‘limitation’ - epitomized by the ideal of unrestricted liberty on the one hand and the necessity of maintaining a stable democracy (grounded on a modern penitentiary system) on the other. Alexis de Tocqueville’s mixed expectations regarding the future of American cities, uttered in 1835, accentuate both their potential (e.g., their affirmative function for the “maintenance of republican institutions”) and their perceived menace to society (in the form of social tensions, the outbreak of riots, etc.). Equipped with an array of oppositional attributes (civilization vs. degeneration, light vs. darkness, etc.), cities have been deployed as metaphors for the ambiguous nature of American democracy. This is illustrated in Charles S TEFAN L. B RANDT 140 Brockden Brown’s twin novels Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly which outline an imagery most characteristic of the post-revolutionary epoch. While attracting thousands of citizens and offering new possibilities of selfrealization, the urban centers also seemed to display a ‘labyrinthine structure’ which made them appear more and more suspect. Did this labyrinthine framework to be found in the big cities not enhance the vices of corruption, prostitution, and moral decay? The yellow fever epidemics of the early 1790s marked a shift from a rather positive portrayal to a widely critical one. The ideal of the ‘Open City’ experienced its renaissance in the 1850s with Walt Whitman who celebrated the American Dream as an offer to cheerful masses of immigrants streaming to the urban centers of the United States. The image of the vibrant American city welcoming its new residents was replaced in turn-of-the-century naturalism (especially in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) by a more pessimistic view that pointed to the flipside of the urban dream. John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, written a few years later, invested this tendency with a new twist by mixing naturalist and impressionist techniques, now depicting a city of moribund questers and deportees. In Dos Passos’s novel, the gradual transformation of the ‘Open City’ into the ‘postmetropolis’ (the overboarding mega city with its fragmented and dislocated sections) is already foreshadowed. If the ‘Open City’ of the modern era operated as a cosmopolitan ideal, the ‘postmetropolis’ after World War II began to indicate a drift towards uncontrolled fragmentation and diversification. Postmodernity’s taste for hyperreal constructions and a questioning of metanarratives is foregrounded in Auster’s detective narratives in The New York Trilogy. The city is experienced here as an inscrutable text whose hidden meaning (if there is one) can no longer be traced or even verified. It is no coincidence that Auster frequently uses references to other narratives of unsuccessful quests - apart from the traditional tale of Don Quixote also to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” where the urban dweller’s search for meaning is exposed as a hoax. In post-9/ 11 fiction, the trope of the ‘open city as closed space’ is reintroduced with a vengeance. The characters’ desperate struggle to cope with the trauma of the terrorist attacks leads to the incorporation of chronotopic images as signifiers of stagnation and emotional deadlock. 24 Whereas the chronotope was utilized in the realist and modernist tradition to illustrate a newcomer’s first encounter with the city, the nexus of time and space is now increasingly employed to negotiate states of hopelessness and hermetic closure. The ‘falling man’ performances which Lianne keeps watching in De- Lillo’s novel by the same title point to a notion of frozen time and failed commemoration. Vignettes of the traumatic events underscore the atmosphere of emotional imprisonment. The characters in Foer’s and Auster’s novels tend to reject the presence of history itself and utilize time as an escape to 24 For a discussion of Don DeLillo’s fiction as a countermodel to the hegemonic discourse of national security, see Brooker’s essay “Terrorism and Counternarratives” (2006). Open City, Closed Space 141 deal with their traumata. Thus, Oskar in Foer’s novel rebuilds historical timelines in order to adapt them to his needs. In Auster’s Brooklyn Follies, the fatal consequences of the 9/ 11 attacks are entirely omitted to leave the protagonist, who has just learned that his cancer will not be fatal, as the happiest man on earth. It has been my main goal to show that the dynamic interplay between openness and closure emerges as an important aesthetic device in U.S. urban fiction. In its diverse configurations, the trope of ‘the open city as closed space’ has been adapted to developments in the emotional and historical framework of American society. Its unbroken strength and relevance as a figure of cultural self-fashioning owes itself to the flexibility of its two components. Openness, in addition to its emancipatory quality, also suggests a mode of construction and fixation, e.g. in the form of established myths such as ‘the city that never sleeps’ which is ironically demystified in Foer’s novel. Closure, in contrast to the term’s classical association with restriction and boundary maintenance, may also point to a possible transcendence of existing limits. If, as I have suggested, the guiding principle of a closed system is its affinity towards over-determination, the ‘petrified’ images produced in literary texts offer a blind spot from which the seemingly ‘shut’ space of the city can be deconstructed, that is: opened up towards its underlying potential. Closed systems, I have argued, always tend to evoke the possibility of subversion, of setting free an inner dynamic and explosiveness already indicated by the mere illusion of ‘hermetic closure.’ The closed spaces in Auster’s, Foer’s, and DeLillo’s narratives are charged with such explosive energy; the novels seem to encourage the reader to reinvent spatial fields within the texts. By means of the dimension of time, ‘frozen’ images like that of the ‘falling man’ or Ground Zero are reinvested with life. The ‘real time’ of urban space is transformed into ‘imaginary time,’ assuming a quality of boundary transcendence and empowerment. If the ‘Open City’ functioned as a labyrinth in Brown, as a place of mystification in Poe, and as an open harbor in Whitman, it became somewhat deconstructed in modern and postmodern texts. Dos Passos interprets the ‘Open City’ as a fluctuating, yet shrinking city in which the searchers either die or have to leave town. In Auster, Foer, and DeLillo, the ‘Open City’ is a place of disintegration and contraction which, at the same time, becomes expansive and multi-leveled through the performative usage of time. It is through the combination of temporal and spatial patterns that the city of postmodernity is literally re-opened, that is, rediscovered as a site of agency and empowerment. The underlying patterns in the texts I have discussed in this essay remind us that the American urban imaginary has always been obsessed by images of ambiguity and outright contradiction. Thus conceived, America’s “metropolitan aesthetics,” as I have termed it, must be seen as a vehicle of critical self-reflection, uniting the components of ‘openness’ (freedom) and ‘closure’ (restraint), which are, as a matter of fact, crucial to an understanding of American society itself. S TEFAN L. B RANDT 142 Works Cited Armborst, Tobias, Daniel D’Oca, and G. 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With a new introduction by Richard Ehrlich. New York: Paddington P, 1970. “Mannahatta”: 216. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Young, Iris Marion. “City Life and Difference.” Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times. Ed. Philip P. Kasinitz. New York: New York UP, 1995. 250-70. G EORG D RENNIG Cities of Desire: Ecotopia and the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary Introduction Though this paper is based on my remarks at the Transcultural Spaces conference, its second part diverges vastly from what I said in October 2008. Talking about tactical articulations of Ecotopian desires, I had fallen prey to an aspect of my research, mistaking parts of an imaginary and their articulation for the material reality. In other words, I had accepted narratives of regional exceptionality in dealing with the environment, when in fact the very specific practices I mentioned were neither specific to, nor originally from, the three cities that are the focus of this essay. This shows the power of the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary, the idea of a region that hinges on an axis from Portland, Oregon, via Seattle, to Vancouver, British Columbia. It is not a coincidence, I assume, that the conference program flyer featured the iconic view of the Seattle skyline, with the Space Needle in the fore-, and Mount Rainier in the background. Why is it the city of Seattle which serves as the illustration for the long version of the conference’s title “Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment in the New Millennium”? The Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary indeed gives expression to desires about postmodern urbanity and its relationship with the vague concept known as nature. In the course of the following pages, I will trace an early formulation of such desires as it appeared in Ernest Callenbach’s utopian novel Ecotopia. Analyzing the novel regarding space-making processes, I will then compare the template advocated by Callenbach to the urban spaces of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, where the desires taught by Ecotopia are a factor in the debates on how to shape spatial reality. But whose desires are these, into what have they been transformed, and is their impact tangible on the ground? Ecotopia First published in 1975, Callenbach’s novel follows the template of classic utopian literature. An outside visitor - in this case, journalist William Weston from the United States - visits a society that must seem alien to him, and is slowly converted to this society’s way of life. In Ecotopia, this alien society consists of parts of California, Oregon, and Washington that have seceded G EORG D RENNIG 146 from the U.S. and are striving for an ecologically sustainable basis of living. Strategic space-making is an essential part of the utopian project portrayed, as is relating the living space to the natural environment. Through this, the nation of Ecotopia becomes a home-place, “Ecofrom the Greek oikos (household or home)” (Callenbach prologue), rather than a non-place which the name “utopia” implies and which Callenbach sees as the result of a nonrelationship with the environment (Pütz 386). The novel’s narrator stays mainly within Ecotopia’s capital, San Francisco, and therefore the descriptions of urban locales are limited to this geographical area. Weston’s first impressions of the changed city reveal how his experience of Ecotopian urbanity differs from what he is used to: The first shock hit me at the moment I stepped onto the street. There was a strange hush over everything. I expected to encounter something at least a little like the exciting bustle of our cities - cars honking, taxis swooping, clots of people pushing about in the hurry of urban life. What I found, when I had gotten over my surprise at the quiet, was that Market Street, once a mighty boulevard striking through the city down to the waterfront, has become a mall planted with thousands of trees. The “street” itself, on which electric taxis, minibuses, and deliverycarts purr along, has shrunk to a two-lane affair. [ … ] Over it all hangs the almost sinister quiet. There is even the occasional song of a bird, unbelievable as that may seem on a capital city’s crowded main street. (12) The details of this passage are worthy of close analysis in their own right, and are exemplary of the novel’s attention to very concrete results of the utopian enterprise. I will, however, direct my attention to the larger scale. The urban space itself is so transformed as to stun the narrator, whom the absence of familiar signifiers of urban space even strikes as “sinister.” The change is so massive that it challenges Weston’s conceptions of what a city is and how it ought to function. This confusion continues as he encounters numerous instances of a spatial order that has reshaped the appearance and character of the city. The complete change in modes of transportation - private motor vehicles barely exist, and have been replaced by public transit, free bicycles, and citizens have returned to walking - remains an integral part of Weston’s observations. Apart from the ecological benefits that are the goal of Ecotopian policies, this new mobility paradigm allows for but also enforces a restructuring of spatial patterns. Downtown San Francisco with its skyscrapers is “strangely overpopulated with children and their parents,” (13) as it has become a mixed-use area while “the former outlying residential areas have largely been abandoned.” In Weston’s perception these new patterns of settlement represent a radical departure from the U.S. norm. The same radical change applies to the new role of nature in the urban fabric. Weston considers the city’s atmosphere “bucolic” (12), as creeks now run along Market Street. The presence of birdsong in the urban soundscape has already been noted. Even hunting, associated with the rural - or the escape Cities of Desire 147 from the city or suburbia - in North American culture, has become an aspect of the urban experience: Maybe they have gone back to the Stone Age. In the early evening I saw a group of hunters, carrying fancy bows and arrows, jump off a minibus, on which they had loaded a recently killed deer. Two of them hoisted it up, suspended on a long stick they carried it on their shoulders, and began marching along the street [ … ] I learned the group had been hunting just outside of town. (15) Weston repeatedly notes that in Ecotopia, the city is a food-producing space on a level that goes beyond the recreational, providing both opportunities for hunting and fishing and the growing of produce. While this is at odds with 20th century notions of urbanity, Callenbach himself has stated that this is a deliberate return to older functions of urban spaces, as cities had not always been only importers of food (Pütz 387-88, cf. Steele). For the purpose of this essay, it is important to see how this inevitably means a much closer relationship of the urban to its environment, especially in the Ecotopian context, which stresses what today is marketed as “organic” food production. One further observation that will become important in what follows is the physical shape of Ecotopians and the culture related to outdoors exercise. The narrator witnesses not only an official government policy that deliberately encourages outdoor exercise, but also the health benefits of an urban setting in which muscle power - i.e., bicycling and walking - is an essential component of personal transportation. In the way that urban space is produced and transformed, the strategies portrayed in the book bear an uncanny resemblance to the processes that urban theorist Mike Davis has called “ghetto landscaping” (Davis 380-95). The “benign” neglect that allowed the decay of primarily African American blue-collar neighborhoods during the Nixon and Ford era (cf. Davis 386-95) had one unintended consequence: a massively increased biodiversity in afflicted urban areas, found elsewhere in the West only in the most massively bombed German cities after World War II (Davis 380-86). In Ecotopia, these forces are at work, too. Though deliberately employed for a very specific purpose, there is an apocalyptic aspect to this abandonment of built environment to nature. “What will be the fate of the existing cities [ … ] They will gradually be razed [ … ] The land will be returned to grassland, forest, orchards, or gardens” (Callenbach 27-28). The result goes against the notion of an expanding urban and suburban space, as “The signs of a once busy civilization - streets, cars, service stations, supermarkets - have been entirely obliterated, as if they never existed” (28). The Ecotopian urban template is thus not exclusively one of creating a new space, it is also one of abandoning the old. From this perspective, the break with the imaginary U.S. city becomes most pronounced. Although the Rust Belt’s spaces of decay are disconcertingly similar, the Ecotopian model views them as desirable. G EORG D RENNIG 148 Ecotopia reflects the desire formulated by Edward Soja “that all progressive social forces - feminism, the ‘Greens,’ the peace movement, organized and disorganized labor, movements for national liberation and for radical and regional change - become consciously and explicitly spatial movements as well” (173). On the one hand, the Ecotopian city thus reflects the spatial changes that might result from a strategic reformulation of the urban along the lines proposed by these movements. San Francisco as described by the narrator is therefore the end result of the internal logic of ecological sustainability. On the other hand, there are other equally sustainable models of habitation that dispense with urbanity (cf. Pütz 388), so Callenbach’s choice of basing his utopia’s human settlement patterns on cities can be read as expressing very specific desires for the future of the North American city in general. The key points of such a city of desire are clear from the descriptions above. Government intervention has created a denser cityscape that is dominated by mixed use, privileges public transit and non-motorized means of transportation over other forms, and has dispensed with suburbia and its forms of land development. The urban relates to its natural environment, even reintroduces it into its center, both for the sake of viewing pleasure and purposes of food production. Finally, the inhabitants literally embody this new urban ideal and its benefits, with the outdoor space - both within the city and beyond its limits - becoming a space for exercising and exhibiting these bodies. Mainstreet Cascadia I would argue that the desires Callenbach articulates have shaped the narratives of this region that shares much of its key features with Ecotopia. Having gone through several permutations in its development, this notion of a region known as Mainstreet Cascadia - the urban axis of Portland-Seattle- Vancouver - is itself an expression of desires for 21st century urbanity in North America. Yet where and how do the imaginary Mainstreet Cascadia - “the images, stories, and legends [...] shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society” (Taylor 23) - and the real cities intersect? Is there an Ecotopian mode of producing space that can be found in these locales? Also, using Taylor’s notion of the imaginary, can it then really be seen as “the common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy,” (23) thus creating desires for certain ways of space-making that would not be feasible otherwise? In 1981, journalist Joel Garreau used the term “Ecotopia” in his book The Nine Nations of North America to describe the region as one of nine North American modes of thought, lifestyle, and economy. Garreau’s journalistic approach to the issue of region serves as a clear articulation of imaginaries of place. The term Cascadia to describe the region is a creation of the 1980s, and Cities of Desire 149 was first used by Seattle ecologist David McCloskey (cf. Abbott 195-96, Haehnle), who drew the borders of the region in accordance with biological and geological factors - i.e. the watersheds of rivers and temperate rainforests. This articulation of a Pacific Northwestern region is meant to evoke a bioregional awareness in which the human impact on the natural environment becomes the center of attention (cf. Sightline Institute). For the purpose of this analysis, however, the key term is Mainstreet Cascadia, described above. Understanding the contemporary debates over the space-making in these cities is only possible if it is based on an understanding of their imaginary. The Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary A short glance at the language used to describe these cities - in other words, a brief overview over the narratives that form the imaginary of said places - is revealing. In 1998, Al Gore “held up Portland as the best of all possible worlds” (Abbott 6). Seattle was considered to be the best city for George Clooney’s Emergency Room character to live in, as this would be the most understandable choice for both the character and audiences at the time (Lyons 2). Vancouver - having by the time of publication of this collection been host to the Winter Olympics 2010 - “has emerged as the poster child of urbanism in North America” (Berelowitz 1). The images and associations connected with the three cities - some of them the result of deliberate selfmarketing - share numerous aspects with Ecotopian urbanity. In his introduction to an anthology of Vancouver short fiction, Douglas Coupland states: “quickly, what makes Vancouver, Vancouver? [ … ] mountains; tall trees; outdoor sports; the bodies to match those sports; outdoor clothing to cover those bodies [ … ] some of these items are cliché, yet they remain integral to the city’s character” (2-3). In this short listing of images, the embodied healthiness of William Weston’s Ecotopian San Francisco comes to the surface. These items fall into the category of myths described by Lance Berelowitz: “Vancouver has propagated a number of myths about itself, now well established and accepted in the public mind,” (1) with “an entire mythology [ … ] around Vancouver’s relationship with ‘Nature’” (15). The Portland Imaginary, in contrast, is not as visual, but more concerned with the political. Lacking an iconic skyline and Pacific Ocean beaches, its reputation stems from concrete policies that have turned Portland into a site which proponents of urban planning and free-market advocates debate, “trying to determine how Portland might serve as a model or warning for other communities” (Abbott 6). In a utopian fashion, it generates demand for government space-making or elicits fears of the same. Seattle, in turn shared - arguably only until the WTO riots of 1999 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble - its standing as a quality-of-life utopia with Vancouver. James Lyons, analyzing “Seattle’s role as an organizing site and G EORG D RENNIG 150 symbolic repository for an enduring set of fears, hopes and desires relating to the changing form and function of America’s urban centres” (9), underscores this prominent position. Providing one half of the setting of the blockbuster romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, the city even shared the spotlight with New York on the cultural map of North America as it is represented by Hollywood. What makes these cities Mainstreet Cascadia, however, is an assumed similarity and connectedness, a loose collection of images that reflect the desires that have been instrumental in forming this imaginary. The following list of these images is by no means exhaustive: Mainstreet Cascadia hosts a hi-tech white-collar economy, which includes Vancouver as Hollywood North, Seattle as the city of Microsoft, and Portland as hosting both adagencies and the creative talent that cannot afford the cost of living in Vancouver. All three cities feature impressive natural scenery and access to the outdoors that in turn engenders the bodies that represent such quality-of-life narratives. After the decay of North American urbanity in the 1970s and 1980s, the three cities became symbols of a different, futuristic urbanity, the “hopes” of Lyon’s diagnosis of Seattle. The privileging of ecological over political boundaries, implied in the name Cascadia, and previously recognized by Garreau in his use of ‘Ecotopia’ as a name for the region, is also an integral feature of the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary. The question of urbanity’s relationship to nature is contained in this, since “the bioregional movement is not just a rural program: it is as much for the restoration of urban neighborhood life and the greening of cities” (Snyder 47). Yet is this idea of a region, embraced by public officials such as Seattle mayor Schell (cf. Moody 7) a reality experienced by its inhabitants? Or is it an artificial construct that has no bearing on the daily lives of the region’s urbanites or its rural inhabitants (cf. Haehnle)? One further question complicates the discussion of this imaginary: whose desires have been at work in articulating Mainstreet Cascadia, and what are its uses? Today’s imaginary of the region would not be possible without massive changes that have taken place regarding the economic basis of the Pacific Northwest. The supposed white-collar urbanity in which the outdoors becomes a space of leisure, and in which nature is not something to be exploited, is a result of the relative decay of extractive industries. The emergence of a changed perception of the three cities relied on a changed material reality (cf. Schwantes 341-85). Filming, writing, and advertising Mainstreet Cascadia into being was therefore also the work of new economic forces. To give one example of such a process: “the rhetorics of Northwest lifestyle” (Lyons 49) have been a major marketing instrument for the outdoor-equipment industry. Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are among the major markets for outdoor-leisure related products (cf. Abbott 56, Lyons 56-61); manufacturers that serve these markets and have achieved global reach are based in the region’s urban centers themselves (cf. Schwantes 383), and are actively using the location of their headquarters as a marketing tool. The marketing of the urban Cities of Desire 151 space - as a space of consumption or as a site to consume the space - also reveals the economic basis of the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary. It was “pivotal to the revitalization of Seattle’s downtown,” (Lyons 91) and is an essential aspect of the way Vancouver is “consciously selling itself [ as a city of desire ] on the global marketplace of cities” (Berelowitz 163). Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver have managed to profit from the economic shifts of the 1970s and 1980s. More than that, however, they - their local economies and the various agents interested in marketing their cities - have used this shift and remade themselves as model cities. The resulting imaginary enables a quality-of-life utopia that policymakers, businesses, and citizen initiatives embrace and use for their purposes. Mainstreet Cascadia as a utopian space can educate desires of a dialogue between urbanity and nature. The tensions that result from such desires, the issues that are left out of discourses of quality of life, and the problems and failures of making spaces that articulate Ecotopian hopes, however, challenge such meanings. The ‘Real’ Mainstreet Cascadia As the imaginary has been shaped by privileged narratives of space - of cities that offer unrivalled quality-of-life as it is determined by major magazines, of a ‘clean’ white-collar economy, of an ecological sensibility and the great outdoors as a playground for urbanites who want to remain in touch with nature - other narratives have become marginalized, being ill-suited for such a utopian perception of the urban locales in question, or even opposed to it. The ways in which space is produced in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland intersect with Ecotopian desires, yet both on the strategic and tactical level, there are failures, dissonances, and challenges to, and struggles over, the meanings of Mainstreet Cascadia as a space of desire. Take David Oates’ meditations on the tension between urbanites enjoying the outdoors as a space of leisure and the reality in which their hopes and uses for nature are in direct conflict with those who have been written out of visions of a 21 st -century urbanity in harmony with nature. It is on Ecotopia Lane on Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary that Oates considers the class aspects of Ecotopian desires: The ahistorical Arcadia: ecotopia built on ignorance of who has lived here or how anyone might, indeed make a living here. How effectively has the environmental movement reckoned with the lives of people who labor in the country, those who bring timber for our houses and meat and grain for our tables? Answer: not at all. Muir and his followers - and I am certainly one - have seldom noticed them. We’re looking somewhere else, looking for that picturesque view, even if it means looking right over the heads of these inconvenient people. It is college kids and urban professionals who feel put-out when pickups and chainsaws appear in the woods with their Pabst Blue Ribbon, their bad manners, and cigarettes and dogs and guns, and their fundamentalist bumper-stickers. And then, of course - once G EORG D RENNIG 152 they are safely out of ear shot - the trailer trash jokes are brought out by the Goretexed urbanites. (Oates 73) Mainstreet Cascadia and its uses ignore those for whom the outdoors does not equal a space of leisure, who cannot afford the products offered by the outdoor equipment industry, and whose livelihoods - dependent on extractive industries or fields connected to them - present a challenge to the ecological sensibilities that are such an essential part of the urban image of the region. When “hundreds of logging trucks converged on downtown Portland” in April 1990, it was lumber industry workers who “took their protest into the stronghold of their perceived enemies, the city-based environmentalists whose support of the Endangered Species Act seemed to value birds over working families and their way of life” (Abbott 112-13). Whether it is named “Ecotopia” or “Mainstreet Cascadia,” the ecological space of desire, the model city of the 21st century in which nature and urbanity enter a symbiosis, is a space of struggles and challenges. The processes of making it ‘real’ can draw on utopian narratives, but the Ecotopian model of a strategic, centrallydirected reshaping of the urban landscape to incorporate nature and attain sustainability, stands in stark contrast to the social realities of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. Ultimately, re-making space strategically and in ways that redefine the relationship of the urban with nature is a slow legislative and administrative process. Desires of better cities can guide discussions, yet in the words of Carl Abbott’s reflections of Portland and ideas of Ecotopia and Cascadia: “All this inspiring rhetoric being noted, we find ourselves back at the bureaucratic realization that environments at the beginning of the twenty-first century are protected through laws, regulations, and plans” (196). Ecotopia as a how-to guide for creating cities has to fail, as it assumes a unity of purpose between all agencies involved in shaping the urban space, such as the city in question as much as its neighboring administrative unit and the larger legislative bodies they are embedded in. One of Mainstreet Cascadia’s essential aspects - that of region - becomes a hindrance, as neither Vancouver, nor Seattle, nor Portland exist in a solitary manner surrounded by wilderness. Even a comparatively successful example of creating a regional body for decisionmaking guided by a framework of containing sprawl and protecting spaces of relative wilderness, the Greater Vancouver Regional District, shows the complications and compromises involved in such efforts (cf. Harcourt 128- 48). Still, the exact kind of inspiring rhetoric criticized by Abbot remains an integral element of debates over the urban setting of Vancouver. For example, former Vancouver mayor and British Columbia premier Mike Harcourt’s and local planner Ken Cameron’s book about “Nine Decisions that Saved Vancouver” is titled City Making in Paradise. Yet one of their tales of success - the development of False Creek, the body of water establishing downtown’s southern border - carries ironic footnotes. It is not only the legacy of what Cities of Desire 153 they consider Vancouver’s entry on the world stage as a city of desire, Expo 86, it also occupies sites which were once instrumental to the timber industry and its suppliers, and would therefore not have been possible without the decline of these industries. Also, the sediments at the bottom of False Creek are toxic (Berelowitz 34). Vancouver may market itself as a model city; the reality, however, is full of “dirty little secrets” (op. cit. 33-37) of a spacemaking that neither sufficiently relates the urban to its environment nor successfully creates ecological sustainability. Building codes do not take into account the likelihood of major earthquakes in the region; houses are constructed for a Southern-Californian climate and then need extensive repairs after the first rainy season. And despite a municipal push for a more bicyclefriendly environment, and the city having a sophisticated though patchy network of buses and the Skytrain system, “the number of cars is rising faster than the rate of population growth” (Berelowitz 36). And yet, these are only some of the problems that the municipality itself is confronted with on its own terrain. Greater Vancouver Regional District - and in Ecotopian spacemaking, the smaller and greater regions are part of the equation - as well as its twenty other municipalities present even more conflicts and struggles over urban and suburban space that need to be resolved. If Vancouver does not measure up to its (self-)image as a model for Mainstreet Cascadian urbanity, Seattle has been a negative model of non-relation to the environment from the outset. The main characteristic of space-making was the commodification of the public space, phrased cynically by local journalist Fred Moody: “Downtown Seattle had spent the 1990s undergoing a depressing renaissance. By 1999, it sported arguably the spiffiest, newest, most fashion-forward and prosperous major urban retail core in the country”(4). Not ecologically-aware governance, but booming economic forces have determined the shape of Seattle. The city has in fact been established in a constant struggle against the forces of nature, with the grading of hills and the filling-in of tidal flats, in an arduous process that kept the size of the city small for a long time (cf. Sale 7-32). The visually most drastic example of the non-incorporation of the natural environment is the physical separation of downtown from Puget Sound by the Alaskan Way viaduct - being at risk of structural failure from earthquakes, however, it is now slated to be replaced by a tunnel between 2011 and 2015, with the goal of establishing “a new waterfront surface street and public open spaces, transit investments, and other city street improvements“ (cf. Washington State Department of Transportation SR 99). The public transportation network, long limited to buses and the tourist-attracting monorail stub, is currently being supplemented by a light rail system that has been voter-approved and is set for expansion (cf. Sound Transit Link). The city’s status as the one member of the urban triad of the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary that had, in contrast to both Vancouver and Portland, no basis in progressive urban planning is slowly changing. Still, Seattle’s position in this imaginary is first and foremost a result of marketing and media trends (cf. Lyons). In the larger public awareness, it is, however, a G EORG D RENNIG 154 less controversial model of turn-of-the-millennium urbanity than its neighbor metropolis to the south. Portland’s reputation is, as mentioned above, the one most strongly connected to Ecotopian desires of strategically re-made space. Not having been as drastically affected by urban renewal and freeway-building as other urban centers - a five-mile stretch of freeway was defeated by citizen initiatives in the early 1970s (Abbott 89-90) - its practices of urban planning were more strongly influenced by neo-urbanist thinking, that is the creation of dense, pedestrian-friendly cityscapes similar to the model advocated in Ecotopia (cf. Abbott 141-42). A light rail network that is free of charge in a central zone, and the relative privileging of bicycle and pedestrian traffic are two major components of urban Portland that come closest to the Ecotopian ideal. The most prominent, and also most controversial example, however, is the Urban Growth Boundary. A state-law measure, Oregon Urban Growth Boundaries (short: UGBs) are an anti-sprawl measure that aims to protect downtowns and their businesses, facilitate efficient planning, creating a clear boundary between urban and rural uses for the benefit of both sides (Metro, cf. Abbott 163). Maintaining and administering the Portland UGB currently includes three counties, “24 cities and more than 60 special service districts” (Metro, cf. Oates 3). Such strategies are vulnerable to shifting political climates - numerous agencies are involved in setting UGBs and accommodating new land needs, and measures that weaken such statutes have been successful at the ballot in the new millennium (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development). Ecotopian urban desires are heavily politicized, the criticism from the right vocal and strong, involving media heavyweights such as George Will and think tanks such as the Cato Institute (cf. O’Toole). The strategically made urbanity of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, diverges from the hopes and ideas expressed in the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary. Ecotopian desires inform the debates in the respective cities to varying degrees, and play a role in the struggles over the meanings and goals of fashioning space in them. Giving meaning to urbanity is not, however, an exclusively strategic exercise. The city’s inhabitants themselves can articulate desires and use space in ways that match Callenbach’s template. The following remarks will therefore address the tactical Cascadia, the daily - or extraordinary - practices that re-make or challenge strategic space and its discourses (cf. de Certeau). Though not a prominent part of the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary, practices from Ecotopia that enjoy increasing popularity worldwide are guerilla gardening and urban foraging. The specific climate of these cities favors such endeavors. In guerilla gardening, the urban space is used to reintroduce plants, as gardeners embed flower seeds in cracks in the concrete, plant flowers or vegetables on unused lawns in the public space, or ‘seed bomb’ vacant lots and inaccessible spaces. Where nature has already provided edible plants, urban foraging becomes possible, either for sustenance, out of culinary adventurism, or in a search for hallucinogenic mushrooms (Berelowitz Cities of Desire 155 17). Though not seriously advocating the practice of hunting in the city, Brendan Kiley’s “The Urban Hunt” in the Seattle city magazine The Stranger serves to show the theoretical possibilities for hunting offered within city limits - a practice that Callenbach’s utopian template deliberately includes. The Cascadia Guerilla Gardening Brigade articulates what these tactical appropriations of space have in common: not that they are exclusive to the Pacific Northwest, but that they tap into the Cascadian Imaginary of a city that relates to nature as a framework for such practices. A completely different mode of shaping Mainstreet Cascadia from the bottom up depends on the political framework of the respective municipality. Both in Portland and Vancouver, freeway projects were stopped by citizen initiatives (cf. Abbott 89-91, and Harcourt 33-55, respectively). Private involvement in political decision-making processes also takes the form of establishing think tanks that articulate and further Ecotopian desires. Sightline Institute, formerly Northwest Environment Watch, has given itself the mission to “bring about sustainability, a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place. Our focus is Cascadia, or the Pacific Northwest” (Sightline Institute website). A more radical bottom-up form of challenging the strategic space infamously found its outlet in the 1999 WTO riots in Seattle. Though this is not the place to debate the global political dimension of the riots, the interpretative frameworks of two chroniclers of Seattle’s 1990s boom - Fred Moody and James Lyons - both perceive them also as a revolt against the commodification of the urban space. Moody, from his position as a journalist and commentator sees them as a logical response to the boom years that reshaped his city for the worse (1-11); thus the subtitle of the book, “the Demons of Ambition,” and the lower half of the cover: a hooded person dressed in fashionable outdoors wear stepping through the broken windows of a looted Starbuck’s franchise. In Selling Seattle, Lyons comes to similar conclusions. Analyzing the spatial politics of Seattle-based Starbucks and their relation to the WTO riots, he ends that particular chapter with the observation: “If Starbucks profited from inviting the customers to ‘eat the street’, then events in Seattle witnessed the streets bite back” (163). Outlook / Conclusion The current economic crisis has already re-shaped North American space in one of its manifestations, the housing crisis. Cities of the Rust Belt have been shrinking and keep doing so, some are now yielding to nature. Some are deliberately reduced in size, with suburbia becoming wilderness again as the bulldozing of derelict neighborhoods has emerged as one of the approaches practiced in the hardest-hit locales, and debated in the media as a possible solution on a national level (cf. Leonard). It is a time of fears and dystopian scenarios for North American cities, mirroring - in this aspect - the state of urbanity at the time Ernest Callenbach wrote and published his utopian vi- G EORG D RENNIG 156 sion. Callenbach’s Ecotopia articulated ideas and desires for making space from a wide range of sources and for a variety of purposes. In the book’s treatment of urbanity, however, a clear model evolved that challenged traditional binaries of city and nature and the very structure and functions of 1970s North American urbanity itself. These desires remained at work in imaginaries of the Pacific Northwest, and formed an essential part of what became a mode of framing the urban axis Vancouver-Portland-Seattle. In the Mainstreet Cascadia Imaginary, however diffuse it is, Ecotopian desires for the city-nature relationship can be articulated. The issue is not whether Mainstreet Cascadia will become Ecotopia. Nor is it whether Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver will become the one model for the future of North American urbanity. The main challenge for Ecotopian thought is to shape the agendas of agents in space-making processes, strategically and tactically, so that they use their imaginaries of region in ways that ultimately help create more sustainable cities that will in turn educate the urban desires of a globalized world. Even if the real space on the ground does not measure up to the ideal and carries toxic legacies of the past, this desire alone is an achievement and a way of preparing for the challenges of urbanity, ecology, and the environment in the new millennium. Cities of Desire 157 Works Cited Abbott, Carl. Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Berelowitz, Lance. Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005. Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia. 1975. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2004. Cascadia Guerilla Gardening Brigade. 7 May 2010 <http: / / cascadiaggb.blogspot. com>. Coupland, Douglas. “Introduction.” The Vancouver Stories: West Coast Fiction from Canada’s Best Writers. Ed. Derek Fairbridge. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2005. De Certeau, Michel. Kunst des Handelns. 1980. Trans. Ronald Voullié. Berlin: Merve, 1988. Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. New York: Avon, 1981. Davis, Mike. Dead Cities. New York: New P, 2002. Haehnle, Brigitte. “Cascadia: A ‘Region’ in the Pacific Northwest.” Regionalism in the Age of Globalism. Ed. Lothar Hönnighausen et al. 2 vols. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005, vol. 2, 225-36. Harcourt, Mike, Cameron, Ken, and Sean Rossiter. City Making in Paradise. Nine Decisions that Saved Vancouver. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007. Kiley, Brendan “The Urban Hunt”. The Stranger (26 Sep. 2006): 1 July 2010 <http: / / www.thestranger.com/ seattle/ Content? oid=81126> Leonard, Tom. “US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive.” Telegraph.co.uk (12 June 2009): 17 June 2010 <http: / / www.telegraph.co.uk/ finance/ financetopics/ financialcrisis/ 5516536/ US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-ord er-to-survive.html>. Lyons, James. Selling Seattle. London: Wallflower, 2004. Moody, Fred. Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2003. Oates, David. City Limits: Walking Portland’s Boundary. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State UP, 2006. Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. “History of Oregon’s Land Use Planning.” 7 May 2010 <http: / / www.oregon.gov/ LCD/ history. shtml> O’Toole, Randal. “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work.” Policy Analysis 596 (July 9, 2007). Pütz, Manfred. “Ecotopia/ Technotopia: An interview with Ernest Callenbach on the Role of Technology in an Ecotopian World.” Amst 41.3 (Fall 1996): 381-95. Sale, Roger. Seattle: Past to Present. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1976. Schwantes, Carlos A. The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Sightline Institute, formerly Northwest Environment Watch. 26 May 2010 <http: / / sightline.org>. Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory. London: Verso, 1989. Sound Transit. “Link Light Rail Projects.” 26 May 2010 <http: / / www.soundtransit. org/ x11204.xml> Steele, Carolyn. Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. London: Vintage, 2009. G EORG D RENNIG 158 Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004 . Washington State Department of Transportation “SR99 - Alaskan Way Viaduct and Seawall Replacement.” 26 May 2010 <http: / / www.wsdot.wa.gov/ projects/ Via duct/ >. Will, George F. ”Ray Lahood Transformed.” Newsweek (25 May 2009): 18 May 2010 <http: / / www.newsweek.com/ id/ 197925/ page/ 1> S ONJA G EORGI Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl Introduction A woman ran down an abandoned road, past broken shop windows and the bombed-out frames of houses. On her feet she wore a pair of blue and silver running shoes that shone with a dazzling light. “Bloody Pallas,” I muttered. I pressed the fast-forward button and the woman scrambled at a fantastic pace down the bombed-out street, which, in spite of its dilapidated state, had a sort of romance about it. (35) The voice in this quote is Miranda Ching, the narrator of the science-fiction novel Salt Fish Girl. Miranda is a young woman who lives in a North American company-owned town in the 2060s. The desire and repulsion the sneakers arouse in Miranda epitomize the paradoxical situation of a world order of globalized capitalist markets in which every desired product - here symbolized by the sneakers - is instantly available at the expense of the environment - symbolized by the bombed-out streets. Salt Fish Girl, written by the Asian Canadian writer Larissa Lai and published in 2002, depicts an urban North American future characterized by a hyper-capitalist system in which a few multinational companies have divided the USA and Canada up among themselves and separated the continent into walled-in compounds and socalled “Unregulated Zones,” familiar to science fiction audiences from the future scenarios of popular works like Blade Runner and Neuromancer. 1 In Lai’s dystopia, citizens and employees have literally become the property of the companies they work for, which genetically engineer women of color as slave laborers. Building upon the work of cyberpunk dystopias who visually and rhetorically convey images of immigrants and members of minority groups in North America as “teeming masses” (Palumbo-Liu 326), Lai critiques capitalist aspects of globalization, such as free trade, free flow of capital, use of cheaper foreign labor markets and their effects on migrant workers. In Salt Fish Girl, the transcultural space takes the form of an urban capitalist dystopia in which ethnicity is commodified: Asian American wom- 1 For a detailed discussion of intertextual references between Salt Fish Girl and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, see Robyn Morris's article “What does it mean to be human? Racing Monsters, Clones, and Replicants.” In Blade Runner, the cityscape of Los Angeles is depicted as a run-down and polluted urban dystopia overcrowded with Asian and Hispanic immigrants. However, the film does not elaborate on this depiction as its main focus is on the conflict between humans and genetically engineered humans, called replicants. S ONJA G EORGI 160 en are being cloned by multinational corporations and used as a labor force for the textile industry. Thus, the gender and ethnic background of the workers seems to be no coincidence but shows that when global capitalist market strategies are consistently applied, the prototype for cloned slave laborers may most likely be the immigrant woman of color, whose DNA is a readily available resource because she is not formally recognized and thus only “virtually” human. Rita Wong defines the status of the women workers in Salt Fish Girl - the genetically engineered women called “the Sonia series” - as “extra-legal,” as “those who may be undocumented or structurally unable to gain access to the nation’s front door” (111). Yet the virtuality and extralegality of the cloned women in Salt Fish Girl refers not only to their unusual genesis in biochemical laboratories and their liminal legal status but to their ethnicity as well. Presumably cloned from the DNA of Asian American women interned during World War II, the ‘virtuality’ or ‘extra-legality’ of the Sonia series as depicted in the novel is rooted in political and social perceptions of ethnic women in North America and put into the context of a global hyper-capitalist world order. By explicitly focusing on the cloned slave laborers, Salt Fish Girl presents a counterdiscourse to the global capitalist market system. The sneakers, described in the above quote as “bloody Pallas” sold by a multinational corporation called Nextcorp, play a crucial role in this counterdiscourse as they not only link producer and consumer but also serve the female workers who manufacture them as tools for a campaign against the corporation that clones and enslaves them. Secretly, the women instrumentalize the shoes as tools of a political subversion campaign by inscribing messages on the soles. In an ironic twist, the consumers/ wearers of the sneakers involuntarily transgress and blur the boundaries between company-controlled compound and Unregulated Zone of urban decay - as well as between company-employed society and poor urban squatters - when they imprint political and poetic messages written by the enslaved factory workers on the muddy roads of the city. Consequently, in this paper, I will read the sneakers as both a metaphor of capitalist exploitation of the city’s inhabitants and their cultural histories and as a metaphor of the political subversion campaign of the cloned factory women. The seizing of the sneakers combined with the cloned women’s appropriation of genetically modified plants is an important strand in the critique the novel levels at the global capitalist system. Furthermore, the sneakers directly address us as readers and demonstrate how we as consumers are implicated in the cycle of globalized production and consumption based on the exploitation of those the novel identifies as the backbone of the production chain: Asian American women workers. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway argues that globalization, genetic science and information technology alter modes of production, consumption and employment. For my reading of Salt Fish Girl it is crucial to stress Haraway’s argument that technology is an important, yet not the defining factor of globalization: “a world capitalist organizational structure is Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 161 made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies” (166, my emphasis). In the context of Salt Fish Girl, technology serves as a tool for global capitalism as outlined in Haraway’s argument. Globalization in the form of an increasingly integrated global economy rests on a patriarchal system of white, male, capitalist domination as mapped by Haraway in her chart of “the informatics of domination” (161-2) as much as it depends on information technology and biotechnology as tools. Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is based on her definition of the cyborg: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149). Haraway identifies female workers in globalized manufacturing sectors as the prototypes of her cyborg trope. Consequently, she points out that the gender of the workers plays a crucial role for their positioning in global capitalism: It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labor-force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. (166) In a continuation of Haraway’s theory of the cyborg as a primarily gendered hybrid subject, Larissa Lai emphasizes the combination of gender and ethnicity as crucial factors for the identity negotiations of her cyborg women in a global capitalist world order. By re-fictionalizing the space of global market capitalism, Lai re-charts the “extra-legal” space which both the transnational hybrid and the cyborg inhabit in this system. Thus, this paper seeks to analyze the cyborg women of Salt Fish Girl through a continuation of Haraway’s “Third World” cyborg by stressing not only the gender but also the specific ethnicity of the cloned factory workers. In the second part of this paper, I will read the identity negotiation of the Sonia series as a key part of the counterdiscourse to the global market capitalism portrayed by the novel. The aspect of hybridity that characterizes the cyborg is similarly discussed in postcolonial theory where it characterizes the immigrant and/ or postcolonial subject. Whereas Homi K. Bhabha describes the post-colonial hybrid as being on an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (4), current debates in postcolonial theory depart from the idea of identities and spaces as “fixed.” In their introduction to Reconstructing Hybridity, Kuortti and Nyman reconsider transnational hybridity, locating it in a contemporary context as “imply[ing] a markedly unbalanced relationship […] as a site of transformation and change where fixed identities based on essentialisms are called into question” (2-3). This notion of hybridity as “problematiz[ing] naturalized boundaries” is used in what the editors call a “counterdiscursive manner” (11) and can be applied almost one-to-one to Lai’s cyborgs. Contemporary postcolonial hybrids as well as Lai’s cyborgs thus claim the “Unregulated Zone” (Lai) of Bhabha’s “stairwell” and call into question his reference to “fixed identifications” such as top and bottom, human and virtual human, white and black, by rejecting them as normative points of reference. S ONJA G EORGI 162 In mainstream cyber-fiction, the cyborgs’ processes of identity negotiation can be compared to the identity quests of colonial hybrids. Similar to the colonial use of the term hybrid to refer to the so-called “illegitimate” and “impure” offspring of colonizer and colonized (Wisker 190-1), in mainstream science fiction the cyborg is also regarded as a threat to human purity, as Blade Runner’s conflict between humans and replicants exemplifies. In contrast to this, transnational migrants in recent postcolonial theory as well as the cyborgs in Lai’s story are individuals who resist identification in terms of the normative categories human/ non-human. Underlining the point that not the colonial but the transnational hybrid finds her counterpart in Lai’s description of the ethnic cyborg, I would describe Lai’s cyborgs with a combination of the words of Kuortti/ Nyman and Bhabha: the cyborgs in Salt Fish Girl are beings who “problematize naturalized boundaries” (Kuortti/ Nyman 2-3) in search of a “cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 4). Having thus situated the cyborgs in Salt Fish Girl in a contemporary postcolonial context, in the following I will analyze Salt Fish Girl through a continuation of Haraway’s theory, where, as outlined above, not only the gender but also the ethnicity of the cyborgs needs to be emphasized. As Lai situates the cyborg characters within an “extra-legal” and Unregulated Zone, the presentation of this futuristic capitalist urban space will be examined in more detail as well. Urban Dystopia In line with urban feminist dystopias of the 1990s, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, which depict a North American society dominated by multinational corporations where individual and cultural histories are suppressed by a corporate ethos of homogeneity and assimilation, Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl also features a scenario where the state has turned over its autonomy to multinational corporations. In Lai’s urban dystopia, poverty, violence and ecological pollution have contaminated both society and nature, turning the North American suburb into a company-owned compound and its citizens into corporate property. Social homogeneity is achieved through the exclusion and repression of diverse cultural customs and histories; in the case of the Sonia series, the production of human labor itself is an objective for multinational corporations. In this bleak setting, the exploited and polluted soil of the Pacific coast becomes part of the narrative voice re-articulating the suppressed and assimilated cultural histories of employees and cloned factory workers alike when these memories resurface in the form of a disease that befalls the inhabitants. One of the “diseased” is Miranda, the narrator of the novel. Miranda is a young woman who lives inside a company town ironically called Serendipity. The narrative reveals that Miranda is in fact an incarnation of the Chinese Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 163 creation goddess Nu Wa, a timeless being able to shift her shape and appearance, who travels through time and space. Nu Wa eventually arrives on the North American Pacific coast where she settles inside a durian, a strongly scented fruit that has been genetically modified to help women conceive. Miranda’s mother eats this piece of fruit, gets pregnant, and at age sixty-three gives birth to Miranda, whose body constantly emanates the “pepper and cat pee” odor associated with the durian fruit (15). The scent of the durian fruit is both a reference to Miranda’s supernatural conception as well as a reference to her non-conformist existence, which the company ethos regards as a remnant of a cultural diversity that has to be repressed. Yet it finds its ways inside the compound walls by leaking through its inhabitants. It is not made clear why the family is eventually expelled from work and home - whether the reason is their non-conformity or the fact that Miranda logs into her father’s online work place and returns the money that her father is supposed to collect as a tax collector for the Saturna corporation to the inhabitants. In any case, the Ching family has to leave the compound and move to the Unregulated Zone. Reminiscent of nineteenth and twentieth century Asian immigrants in North America, the family opens up a makeshift store where they sell fruits and vegetables. It is in the Unregulated Zone that Miranda befriends Evie, one of the genetically engineered women of the Sonia series, who escaped the factory where she had to manufacture the Pallas sneakers for the Nextcorp Corporation. By juxtaposing a small and family-run store in the Unregulated Zone to the multinational corporations, Lai comments on the brand-name dominated cityscape that downgrades urban citizens to mere property and resource and prohibits a private life and individual cultural customs. However, Lai’s corner grocery store is not simply a new version of a romanticized space that repeats stereotypes of Asian businesses in North America as places where food, weapons and cheap gimmicks are sold. Lai resituates this “typically” Asian American store by presenting it as a complex and ambiguous place, a space full of history, individual tragedy and family life that addresses the economic and political implications and situations of the inhabitants (Wong 117). Situating the family store within a global market, Rita Wong observes: Embedded within the corporate hegemony of the PEU [Pacific Economic Union] are simultaneously forms of small economy that, although discursively colonized under the force of capital, nonetheless present material alternatives that have quietly co-existed in the shadows of the corporate wealth. (118) Yet the store is not just a nostalgic longing for a presumably simpler past but a complex and conflicted space for the family, especially when Miranda’s mother dies in an accident in the store. Although haunted by cultural and personal history, the store is at the same time a place where the family can live - at least temporarily - without the threat of constant surveillance and the pressure of corporate homogeneity. S ONJA G EORGI 164 That this corporate homogeneity can make citizens dependent on the company and eventually unable to live without it becomes apparent when the global market situation abruptly changes: After the stock market crisis and the further devaluation of the dollar, after the number of cars on the street diminished to a dull roar [...] the big corporations, Saturna and Nextcorp among them, laid off workers and cut pensions to the point that my father began to think that perhaps his dismissal had been a blessing in disguise. Workers flooded out of the corporate compounds and into the Unregulated Zone. Many people, my father’s ex-colleagues included, could not work out ways to make a living. The missions were full, and people died in droves beneath the bridges and in the open-air rooms of half collapsed buildings. (84-5) It is at this point in the narrative that the mysterious disease called “dreaming” appears inside the compounds. Apart from the peculiar odors of the infected, the disease causes dreams with historical content. In the Unregulated Zone, Miranda meets several people infected with the mysterious illness, like the man “who smelled of milk and could remember all the famines that had ever been caused by war [...] a girl who smelled of stainless steel and could recite the lives of everyone who had ever died of tuberculosis” (101-2). Through the dreaming disease, history finds its way back into the compounds, with the polluted soil as carrier and the infected as medium: “They theorized it might be the product of mass industrial genetic alteration practices,” Evie explains to Miranda (102). Stories, histories and cultural customs repressed by corporate homogeneity thus resurface in the form of smells, dreams and memories. As the disease is believed to be transmitted through the soil, for example by walking barefoot on the beach, the Pallas sneakers from the advertisement come into play as they are said to provide protection from it. However, it is also rumored that the shoes transmit the disease, in which case the sneakers again come to signify the omnipresence of global market control and a subsequent global homogeneity of customs and styles, which suppress regional and cultural practices. This global market control strategically deploys social, cultural and gender roles not only by using women as manufacturers of goods as emphasized by Haraway, but also by specifically targeting women as consumers: Shoes worn by middle-class, middle-aged suburban women, scared of growing old, uninterested in the world they live in, except insofar as it can provide them with beautiful things to reward them for their long treacherous days in office towers pumped full of fake air, or at home, organizing groceries and menus, vacuuming, trying to make something they can call their own from what comes in cardboard boxes and plastic wrappers from the megastore strip mall. (Salt Fish Girl 226) This quote comments on a cultural homogeneity that accompanies the distribution and consumption of products designed for a global market, like the Pallas sneakers. The peculiar yet natural or human-caused smells that are a symptom of the dreaming disease are another comment on this subjugation of diverse cultural practices, customs and characteristics. In a world where Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 165 Coca Cola and McDonald’s replace regional practices, cuisines and tastes, individuality and diversity are eventually lost. It becomes apparent that it is difficult if not impossible for the average consumer to escape this cycle of globalized production and consumption when Miranda is hired by a marketing agency to design advertisements for the dreaded sneakers. In the afterword to her novel When Fox is a Thousand, Lai articulates the intricate cycle of global production and consumption that we as customers are trapped in every day: “How […] are we to imagine ourselves out of the suffering we become implicated with every time we fill our tanks, invest our money, eat a hamburger, or go to the mall? ”, she asks (258). Hence, in Salt Fish Girl, the Pallas sneakers symbolize producers and consumers alike as they signify the suppression of women as both “fashion victims” and victims of economic exploitation. Yet at the same time the sneakers show that individual agency can be reclaimed when the cloned women employ the sneakers as tools for their political subversion campaign. Thus, the borders between consumer and consumed, between exploiter and exploited, are blurred and complicated in the novel, reflecting the intricate workings of a globalized market. With the genetically engineered Sonia series cloned from the DNA of Asian American women, Lai not only portrays the interrelatedness of consumer and consumed but also draws attention to the role racial and gender categories play in this global market order. Lai projects a futuristic scenario that thinks through what Rita Wong terms “the logic of contemporary capitalist relations” (111), and connects this logic to what could be called the rationale of colonial relations by drawing attention to the ethnic background of the genetically engineered factory workers. Thus Lai’s racialized cloned women are a consistent continuation of the global capitalist world as mapped by earlier dystopias, such as Blade Runner: when human beings are turned into products for consumption on the global capitalist market, Lai’s story shows, the prototype for human simulacra is the “virtually” human immigrant woman of color as she is virtually without legal rights. Here, Haraway’s women workers become the prototypes for the cyborg women as the novel shows that gender as well as ethnicity defines the workers’ status of cyborgs. Salt Fish Girl places contemporary issues such as the genetic engineering research of the Human Genome Diversity Project, biotechnological advances by companies like Monsanto, and the tapping of labor markets in so-called Third World countries by textile companies like Nike into a fictional context.2 Applying these developments to a future scenario, her portrait of the cloned sweat shop workers is a consistent consequence of a globalization unrestricted by national and international policies protecting workers and consumers, as the following examples will show. Lai 2 In Europe, the distribution of genetically modified corn and wheat seeds by Monsanto as well as laws issued by the European Union governing the planting of these seeds are currently receiving new public attention, as Jutta Hoffritz writes in Die Zeit. S ONJA G EORGI 166 hence maps a critique of the contemporary capitalist logic onto a fictional futuristic urban space. Through Evie, Miranda and the reader find out how companies like Saturna and Nextcorp operate and not only control national and international markets but also the environments, media and public life of their employees. We learn from Evie that Nextcorp clones human beings as slave laborers for their manufacturing of sneakers. Referencing debates on biotechnological and genetic engineering research contemporaneous to the novel’s publication, we read that “Nextcorp bought out the Diverse Genome Project [... which] focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction” (160). It is thus no coincidence in the novel that the cloned workers in the sweat shops have “brown eyes and black hair, every single one” (160). In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, Donna Haraway explains the consequences the patenting of genetic information may have: Biotechnology in the service of corporate profit is a revolutionary force for remaking the inhabitants of planet Earth, from viruses and bacteria right up the now repudiated chain of being to Homo sapiens and beyond. Biological research globally is progressively practiced under the direct auspices of corporations, from the multinational pharmaceutical and agribusiness giants to venture-capital companies that fascinate the writers for the business section of daily newspapers. (245) 3 Drawing attention to the “social reality” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 149) of their existence, to the fact that because of their “extra-legal” status they are the most economical resource in the globalized production cycle, the Sonias distribute foot-printed messages as part of their subversion campaign. These include their individual as well as collective histories, as in the following message which points out their exploitation as workers and the corporation’s enormous profit: materials: 10 units labour: 3 units retail price: 169 units profit: 156 units Do you care? (Salt Fish Girl 238) Moreover, the cloned women reclaim their sexuality and reproduction abilities through the use of genetically modified fruits and vegetables. This strategy eventually encompasses all of the categories Haraway sees as being systematically controlled by multinational corporations: “reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption and production” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 166). 3 See Haraway's Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (244-53) for a further discussion of the Human Genome Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project. Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 167 The ‘Unregulated Zone’ of Cyborg Identity Evie and her sisters acknowledge their “extra-legal” genesis in a laboratory, which was made possible because of the fact that society does not officially recognized the cloned women as human beings and therefore the laws governing human biomaterial do not apply to them (Salt Fish Girl 158). Rejecting normative social categories and reclaiming her extra-legal conception Evie proudly says, “My genes are one point zero three percent [...] freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life form” (158). Evie thus defines herself as a subject living outside the categories of human/ non-human, legal/ “extra legal.” She and her sisters not only inhabit an uncharted territory - the house they squat in inside the Unregulated Zone - but also struggle with an uncharted identity. The narrative development invites us to relate Evie to the replicants in Blade Runner, especially when she points out that she was not designed for “wits or willpower, but [that she] was an early model. They couldn’t control for everything” (158-9). Evie ascribes her willpower and mental strength to the fish genes the genetic engineers used in order to circumvent laws protecting human biomaterial. Like the Nexus 6 models of Blade Runner she develops her own will, questioning and escaping her designated space as a slave worker for the corporation that engineered her. In the words of Wong, the novel thus “refram[es] the binary of ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’, [which] provides one way of rejecting the stigmatization of so-called ‘illegal,’ or extra-legal workers” in present day North America by letting the cloned women not only accept but rather embrace their hybrid identity (121-2). The identity quest of the Sonias takes place on two levels: the immediate political campaign they plan against Nextcorp by distributing sneakers with imprinted messages and their long-term plan to create a new society by using genetically mutated vegetables and fruits like the durian to help them conceive children of their own. For their political subversion campaign - the distribution of pamphlets and the infiltration of corporate factories - the Sonias turn the sneakers they manufacture into activists’ tools that leave political and poetic messages on the muddy roads of the city: “What does it mean to be human,” or “How old is history? ” (237). When posed by the cloned women, these questions are more than a reference to real-life slave labor like conditions in sweat shops that can be found in South East Asia as well as in California (R. Lee 191). When articulated by the cyborgs themselves, these questions force the reader to think through processes of production in a globalized market, production processes that are usually taken for granted by consumer society, which simply purchases goods that appear on store racks. “The shoemakers have no elves” (Salt Fish Girl 237). This poignant shoe-print points to the invisible human labor which actually sews the Pallas sneakers. The factory as prison for the enslaved women becomes a space where they appropriate the tools they work with in order to communicate with each other and with the outside world. Even though the Sonias succeed in distrib- S ONJA G EORGI 168 uting the shoes with their political messages, the plan to “infiltrate all shoe factories” across compounds fails and the Sonias are killed (249). Because of their status as virtual citizens, they have no legal protection. Miranda describes the “extra-legal” status they are confined to: “Without a legal existence to begin with, they could not be reported missing” (249-5). Sonia 14, one of the early models able to hide together with the Sonias’ children from the company police, finds a freshly dug mass grave where the Sonias were buried. Subverting Nextcorp’s claim that the cloned women have no individual identity, Sonia 14 identifies her dead sisters separately: “She recognized Sonia 148 by her hand, still wearing a ring cut from a bit of copper pipe. She recognized Sonia 116 by the mole in her heel” (250). Reminiscent of the replicants, and “despite the sameness of their origins,” in Robyn Morris’ words the Sonias become “more human and individual than those who manufacture or hunt them down” (91). Yet the elements of urban dystopia are maintained by the novel as the Sonias are not permitted to lead their lives outside their masters’ profit margin and control in spaces they usurp for themselves, such as the abandoned house and garden they inhabit and cultivate. Their activist sabotage of the capitalist system with pamphlets and infiltration does not work, because the Sonias do not acknowledge the complexity of the global capitalist market system, as Tara Lee observes: The Sonias fail in their endeavor, not because resistance is always doomed, but because they resort to old tactics of resistance that existed when power functioned in a much more unified and coherent manner. Their use of the ancient printing press and their cultivation of a garden is a yearning for the past and serves more of a retreat to organic wholeness than a move that will allow them to combat how power is now configured. Even their seizing of the factory ignores the complexities of biotechnological production and mistakes the machinery within the factory for the locus of power. (107) The tools of subversion which ultimately persist in a global capitalist system are the bodies of the Sonias’ babies and of Evie and Miranda, who escape the grip of the Pallas Police by retreating beyond the borders of Nextcorp. Tara Lee explains the importance of the survival of the cyborg bodies in Salt Fish Girl: “Paradoxically, capitalism implicates all bodies, and yet Lai suggests, effective resistance must be embodied” (104). Although Evie’s and Miranda’s escape to the forest at the end of the novel suggests a retreat from the commodified urban space, the laboratories used for secret experiments in genetic engineering hidden in the forest show that in fact even the non-urban space is under corporate control. In Salt Fish Girl, there is no division between the commodified urban space and pristine nature. Both city and forest are part of the compartmentalization and commodification of space by the global capitalist system. Therefore, the flight of the two women to the forest is not a final withdrawal from the urban space and the patriarchal capitalist system but can only be a temporary retreat, as Miranda’s final statement shows: “Everything will be all right, I thought, until next time” (Salt Fish Girl 269). Although the activist campaign fails, the genet- Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 169 ically modified plants prove successful for the long-term plans of the cyborg women. Like the companies in the novel using information technology and bioengineering as devices to promote globalization, the women similarly make use of biotechnology. Although the Sonias are murdered, their identity quest and the subsequent creation of a new society presented in the novel as a counterdiscourse to the global capitalist system partially succeeds as the babies survive. The Sonias are able to subvert the master/ slave situation after all by finding a way of creating their own offspring - not in laboratories but by using the genetically modified plants abandoned by the corporations and their scientists. In the novel’s showdown, Evie confronts her scientist “father” Dr. Flowers with the murder of her co-workers/ ”sisters,” and the extent of the Sonias’ long-term subversion through the re-claiming of their bodies and their success in charting their cyborg identity is revealed: “Do you understand what those degenerate Sonias were doing at that house? ” “You gave the orders, didn’t you? ” The knife appeared in her hand so quickly I could not be certain where it came from. But now the cool blade pressed, razor sharp, against the sagging flesh of his throat. “I had no choice, Evie,” he rasped. “The tree...” And in that moment I understood the secret of the trees, the clever Sonias and the depth of their subversion. That they were building a free society of their own kind from the ground up. “The Sonias had been cultivating that tree, those cabbages and radishes for years. You had no right...” “You don’t know,” said the doctor, “What monstrosities might have come of those births. Those trees have been interbreeding and mutating for at least three generations since the original work. The fertility those durians provided was neither natural nor controllable. It was too dangerous.” “But what you did to make me, to make us, was not? I should cut your heart out and eat it.” “I’m a scientist, Evie. Whereas those Sonias...not human.” (255-6) Whereas Dr. Flowers insists on re-drawing the lines of male scientist and female property, of human and virtual human, the cyborg women transgress these borders between natural and artificial, organic and machine. With the Sonias’ plan to build a “free society of their own kind from ground up” (256) and with the children they were able to give birth to, Lai applies Haraway’s proclamation of the cyborg who, as Haraway says, “does not expect its father to save it through the restoration of the garden [of Eden], that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 151). Yet as the murder of the Sonias eventually shows, the free society of the cloned ethnic women still remains a dream moving up and down the assembly line (257-8), as only individuals manage to escape and create their own temporary safe spaces outside the territory of mainstream society. S ONJA G EORGI 170 Conclusion “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other,” Haraway writes (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 175). By putting advances in biotechnology and international immigration and labor policies into historical and contemporary contexts, Lai demonstrates how the cyborg workers’ gender and ethnicity are exploited by the capitalist system. Hence, ethnicity has to be reclaimed. For the reader as a consumer, Lai’s story pronounces the Catch-22 of a globalized market in which every desired product is instantly available at the cost of ecologically and socially irresponsible behavior. Telling the flip side of global capitalism, the stories of the cloned women not only critique but also present a counterdiscourse to global capitalism. As has been shown, the key aspect of this counterdiscourse is the women’s acceptance of their cyborg identities and of their cyborg bodies. During their identity quest the characters in Salt Fish Girl transgress the border between human and virtual human; like transnational hybrids of postcolonial theory, they chart the “in-between” space of the “stairwell” (Bhabha 4) as their own territory by reclaiming for their own objectives their bodies which are used as resource in the capitalist production cycle. By appropriating the biotechnology the corporate scientists use in order to produce cheap labor resources for the corporations, the cyborg women present a possibility of resistance to the system and support Haraway’s claim that the new technologies make possible rather than cause the global capitalist system the novel critiques. The Sonia series chart the “Unregulated Zone” and “extra-legal” status of their existence by re-claiming and using their bodies not as product and property of the corporation but as individual entities within the system. They ensure their continued existence circumventing patriarchal control and capitalist profit: I thought, we are the new children of the earth, of the earth’s revenge. Once we stepped out of mud, now we step out of moist earth, out of DNA both new and old, an imprint of what has gone before, but also a variation. By our difference we mark how ancient the alphabet of our bodies. By our strangeness we write our bodies into the future. (Salt Fish Girl 259) Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the characters in Salt Fish Girl first struggle with the status of their ‘virtuality.’ Through these struggles, however, they learn to reclaim and turn the ‘Unregulated Zone’ of their ‘extra-legality’ into what Baccolini and Moylan call a “utopian impulse” in an otherwise dystopian surrounding (7). Returning to the context of the dystopia, the ‘utopian impulse’ in Salt Fish Girl is the state in which Miranda and Evie have captured the space of their ‘virtuality’ for their own advantage and have found a way to re-chart their cyborg identity. Because they have transgressed the borders mainstream society has erected around them when defining them Ethnic Space and the Commodification of Urbanity 171 as virtual human beings, the baby Miranda gives birth to at the end of the novel, conceived through the consumption of a genetically altered durian fruit, suggests the birth of a new cyborg generation. As “new children of the earth,” this generation is born outside the dichotomies of human/ nonhuman, legal/ extra-legal, white/ black, male/ female, rich/ poor. Its birth proves the successful subversion of the white patriarchal and corporate control exerted on its cyborg mothers. The baby heralds a new generation that no longer struggles with the border of legal and ‘extra-legal’ but redefines the space of ‘virtuality’ that mainstream North American society reserves for both transnational hybrids and cyborgs. S ONJA G EORGI 172 Works Cited Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan. “Introduction. Dystopia and Histories.” Dark Horizons. Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. New York: Routledge, 2003. 1-12. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and the Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81. ---. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hoffritz, Jutta. “Erntezeit.” Die Zeit. 26 Mar. 2009: 28. Kuortti, Joel and Jopi Nyman: “Introduction: Hybridity Today.” Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition. Eds. Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 1-18 Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002. ---. When Fox is a Thousand. 1995. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 2004. Lee, Robert. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Lee, Tara. “Mutant Bodies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl: Challenging the Alliance Between Science and Capital.” West Coast Line: 38: 2 (2004): 94-109 Morris, Robyn. “‘What does it mean to be human? ’: Racing Monsters, Clones and Replicants.” Foundation 33.91 (2003): 81-96. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/ American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Wisker, Gina. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Wong, Rita. “Troubling Domestic Limits: Reading Border Fiction Alongside Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.” BC Studies 140 (2004): 109-24. J EAN K EMPF The American Small Town and the Reconstruction of Space Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential candidate, built most of the argument of her speech at the National Republican Convention on her growing up in a small town, and although she kept mentionning her being a new Alaskan, a hockey mum, and an exorcised evangelist, the small town motif dominated. Her choice, or rather that of the Republican party spin doctors and speech writers, was obviously not biographical. It was clearly designed to help a John McCain whose origins are urban and upper middle-class and, and was aimed at the Obama-Biden team whose connection to ‘heartland America’ was tangential at best. The fact that it was engineered at all in the 21 st century tells us something about the power of the small town as a locus in American ideology, or even psyche. Palin made things even clearer when addressing a fund raiser rally on North Carolina on October 16, 2008 she declared: We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation. (my italics) With this new statement she re-established the old connection between ‘small towns’ and ‘real America,’ a logical equivalence which is all the more powerful that both sides of the equation remain undefined as self-explanatory (selfevident) ‘values.’ American novelists also give a very good indication-albeit more critical- of the power of the small town in American imagination. Sherwood Anderson is often quoted in that respect as the initiator of the theme, although one finds earlier examples 1 . Closer to us, Richard Russo and Richard Ford show how alive the field is for novelists. They restage the central conundrum of those who live there: you can’t stay but you can’t leave either. Next to Russo and Ford, both sentimental describers of small-town America in a documentarian mood, John Updike is a much drier, much more conceptual writer of philosophical tales. Where Russo and Ford chronicle small-town America, 1 Novels and short stories dealing in one way or another with the small town are too numerous to quote. Let us just mention, for the record, Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) on a Maine town, at <http: / / www.bartelby.com/ 125/ > (accessed 10 June 2010), Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1915) on a Midwestern small town; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919); William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940); Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding (1946). J EAN K EMPF 174 Updike synthetizes the American Small Town, a theme I suggest lies at the bottom of his chronicling American morals through the looking glass of couples. I will argue in this article that the American Small Town is a concept and as such transcends the actuality of place (the small towns). 2 It constructs a mental, emotional, memorial space, called ‘America’ and forms an American ethos - some would say habitus - which in turn generates an American-ness. 3 It seems to me that this process of (stereo)typification accompanied a movement of nationalization of the American experience which began after the Civil War and went on until well into the 1970s. This process is at work in many of Updike’s novels, and in particular in Couples (1968), set in a New England small town and Villages (2004), where Updike compares two small towns, one in Pennsylvania, that of his hero’s youth, and one in New England, his hero’s “last village most likely save for the Bide-a-Wee Terminal Care Complex”(50). Updike’s choice is meaningful as the New England or Mid-Atlantic small town has come to embody the generic American small town, as evidenced for instance by the fact that the most famous play on the topic, Our Town (1938) was set in New Hampshire (apparently after the town of Peterborough) and not in rural Wisconsin where its author, Thornton Wilder, was born in and which had its fair share of “real” small towns. It is as though those were not real enough to become the archetype required by the movement of cultural nationalization that swept American society in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the true power of the locus could only establish itself by transcending documentary evidence. I use the term transcend specifically to explicitate a relationship between the ‘object’ (itself moving, unstable and constructed by language) and the concept. The ‘real’ small town gave way to the ‘idea’ of the small town, without losing a part of its actuality, and rather gaining strength from it. It became an hybrid space combining real and imaginary dimensions, while remaining a purely domestic object, one very little shared by the rest of the world, far from the ‘international’ image of the United States, e.g., the famed ‘American dream.’ It was also the source of other models and countermodels, most specifically those of community. 4 In short, it functions as a lieu de mémoire 5 . The term cannot be satisfactorily translated into French, Italian or 2 In this article I will usually refer to ‘small towns’ when I mean the ‘real’ towns and ‘the Small Town’ when I mean the concept. This dichotomy, however, cannot be absolute as the concept is deeply embedded in actuality as I argue infra. 3 ‘Habitus’ is an old term used by sociologists (Mauss, Elias, etc.) and some philosophers before them, that was rejuvenated by Pierre Bourdieu and constitutes one of the central points of his theory. It means a series of dispositions acquired by an individual to navigate among fields. 4 For the historiography of the small town, see Baker & Biger; Bertens & D’haen, eds.; Francaviglia ; Lingeman, with a rich bibliography; Meinig, ed.; Rifkind; Smith; Upton & Valch ; Vidich & Bensman. 5 For a definition of lieux de mémoire as opposed to lieux de la mémoire, see Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992), 7 vols; and their double publication in English: Realms of The American Small Town 175 German. If Heimat, terroir or paese are versions of a similar concept, each remains deeply intimately anchored by a localized culture (in fact generated by it) and thus offers a view on how every culture negotiates its roots and thus its values. I will not follow the avenue of comparative ethnology in an attempt to characterize the nuances between the above terms, and-following-the societies that have produced them. The pursuit is legitimate but it is the focus of other studies. Here my intention is rather to identify other types of continuities which are more psycho-political than properly ethnological or geographical, leading me to define what I call the nostalgic space of America. Nostalgic space may sound oxymoronic in the American context. Regret and loss seem to be rather far from the psyche of a people and a nation which, since the beginning, have defined themselves as grown on a tabula rasa and moved by an ideology of progress made into a principle of governement. The United States as a willed construction has built itself on the transformation of the past from the impedimenta of legacy into the promise of a future, as evidenced by the famous Shakespeare quote from The Tempest, “What is past is prologue,” carved in marble at the entrance of that temple of the nation’s memory, the National Archives on the Washington Mall. 6 Closer to us, a recent immigrant, Janet Wolf, Professor of English at the University of Rochester and author of Resident Alien, speaks of the US as “a site for a potential self”, and Bharati Mukherjee said (in 1997), somewhat emphatically, but tellingly, that America was, for him, “the stage for the drama of selftransformation” (Leach 27-28). These contemporary statements are to be seen in a long line of attempts at defining American-ness and whose first best known attempt is probably Letters from an American Farmer (de Crèvecoeur). All are characterized by the program of individual transformation made possible by the potential offered by the continent. 7 This potential, however, will be played out (or not) on a stage, that of the space of the nation (embracing both its mental and physical territory) as this other great exegete of American history, F.J. Turner stated in his “Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (1996-1998); Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire (2001). See also Nora, “Between Memory and History” (1989). 6 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act II, scene i, lines 253-54: “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come/ / In yours and my discharge.” <http: / / www.bartleby.com/ 70/ 1121.html - 250> (accessed 10 July 2010). The statue is named: “The Future” (1933-1935) and was carved by Robert I. Aitken. See <http: / / www.thucydides.netfirms.com/ dustbi n/ biguns/ archivstatue.html> (accessed 7 May 2010). 7 On the various avatars of the idea, see Kazin & McCartin. Although the concept of Americanism is somewhat different from that of Americanism, many of the contributions of this volume deal with “what it means to be an American” therefore posing the double postulate of Americanism, unity and intangibility (or transcendence). Thus the subtitle of the book should have been “The History of an Idea.” J EAN K EMPF 176 The word ‘reconstruction’ in the title of this paper describes exactly that double movement, for it evokes both a cataclysm (usually a war or a natural disaster) - here the severing of the ties 8 - and the act of reaching into the past. It is difficult to identify with any great precision when the inversion took place, but it is safe to assume the Civil War-as American cataclysm-played a major part in it and that it permeated the whole formidable post-war expansion (cf. Kammen). The spectre of the decline has always been present, however, but it waxed and waned as so many cycles of growing anxieties about the present. Towards the 1920s, it gave birth to a feeling of nostalgia, for nostalgia is a promise of return - if only an imaginary one -, a manner of organic link with the past, and as such a way of controlling change. Not surprinsingly, the Small Town as a central motif of and vehicule for nostalgia appeared in the 1920s and 1930s at the moment when on the one hand the United States was undergoing one of its greatest crisis of self-definition and on the other the real small towns were fast declining, two reasons to make them apt at functionning as lieux de mémoire. As Pierre Nora, the French historian of memory and inventor of the concept of lieux de mémoire, remarked, social ‘conscience’ of the existence of memory - i.e., of a memorial process- surges as memory ceases to be ‘natural,’ and needs to be recovered and passed on (Introduction to Les Lieux de mémoire). As the object of a conscious negotiation, the small town thus memoralized can become a currency in this exchange. Those are the basic features of the issue, its problems and limits. I will now address the nature of the small town, and then hypothesize its function in American culture. The Invention of the Small Town Although there have been historically defined and geographically located urban structures that can be identified as small towns, we are not dealing here with a scientific construct but with imagination. Those small towns definitely played a part as models for the small town but what we must be after is the Ur Small Town. The real small towns have been studied quite thoroughly by geographers (cf. Stilgoe). Small towns are and were different in different parts of the country. Geography and sectional culture matter. But what appears clearly is that the model is very early the New-England Village, itself being idealized in a sort of clean, ordered and quiet version of the small town, invented and dis- 8 The Declaration of Independence (1776) reads: “When it became necessary for one people to sever the ties that have united them to another.” The motif of the “severing of the ties,” or of the turning of age (Paine, Common Sense, 1776) is recurrent in American political imagination. It is so because each immigrant had to live for him/ herself this severing of ties by the rite of passage to America, in a movement where ontogenesis meets philogenesis. The American Small Town 177 seminated as early as the mid 19 th century by artists and writers often using it as a foil against the growing metropolis and its industrial/ commercial economy (Francaviglia 140-42). Francaviglia showed how, by the late 19 th century, growing middle-class income allowing for travel and leisure, the villages entered into the realm of active ‘touristic’ promotion, and later in the 20 th century tourist economy (in particular the economy of preservation or, to be more precise, of recreation/ reconstruction.) This process itself has a history, and the waxing and waning of the small town in American discourse is a very good indicator of the evolving definition of the American project as a whole. It helps us follow its tensions and contradictions, those born from the discrepancies of the ideal with the realities of the country. Technically, the small-town structure ceased to be prominent after the first decade of the 20 th century, and one can safely say that their apex was reached in the last half-decade of the 19 th century, not very long after the frontier was declared “closed” by the Bureau of the census. My own work on census data points at the 1910 census as a watershed in terms of number of towns (loosely defined for the time being as having a population of less than 25 000, but this definition will be discussed infra as it is precisely one of the central issues). After that date, and until 1950, statistical data show a continuous decrease of the small town, despite a stabilization between 1930 and 1940 as some city-dwellers back migrated to towns. If you decide on a different, stricter gauge, the 10,000-inhabitant definition, the phenomenon is even clearer with a sharp population loss over the same period, and a fast decrease in number of units. The phenomenon is mirrored by the development of urban centers with a population in cities comprised between 25 and 100,000, growing fast and in similar proportions. The actual reasons for the shift are numerous, some are structural and global, some conjunctural and local (means of transportation, evolving modes of socialization, etc.) but they are not central in this analysis. Not surprinsingly, it is the city which occupies the forefront of American imagination in that transitional period, the three decades ranging from the 1890s to the 1920s. The city, the large urban center, having undergone a complete revitalization through progressist policies, which moralized city governments, and now hosted a new architecture for the metropolis - the skyscraper- became a leading subject for art and painting in particular. 9 The size and complexity of endeavors as the famed Columbian Exhibition (1893), associated with the verticality of the city, and expressed the triumph of the American model of finance, as the factory had done for the new industrial society a few decades earlier. One of the aesthetic forms of this model is the industrial sublime, embodying the American model that one sees at work not 9 The work of the Ash Can School is one good instance of such focus on the vibrant city. J EAN K EMPF 178 only domestically but abroad, as for instance in the taking over of the Panama Canal project abandonned by the French. 10 The major lesson of quantitative data, however, is that the urbanization of American imagination precedes by about a decade actual demographics, just as the resurfacing of small-town imagination follows its actual demographic disappearance. The hypothesis I make is that both the city and the smalltown images were maieutic devices - albeit completely opposite in nature - to help society, that is to say individuals within their various social institutions to accept, bear or even defend the actual state of affairs, in other words adapt to a largely incontrolable future transformed, by the power of images, into destiny and will. In that sense it is legitimate to speak of ‘reconstruction’ of landscape: reconstruction as much from a chronological perspective as from a psychological one. What is a ‘Small Town’? What makes the Small Town a particularly powerful instrument is that, as an imaginary construct, it does not bear any technical, quantitative definition. The small town is not defined by its size, and no one would quite agree on the population which constitutes a small town, and beyond which population one ceases to speak of a ‘small town’ - within limits of course. At the same time as a “real entity”, it requires a definition. In the tension between these two imperatives lies the imaginary and societal power of the small town. The safest and probably most central definition is that it constitutes a community, a somewhat self-defined term. A small town is a place where people know one another, and in some way are interconnected, or feel so. It is where identity is built by interpersonal relationships and against indifference to place (a worrying trend that Josiah Royce, one of the great ideologue of Americanness of the early 20 th century, expressed repeatedly). Place and people matter and the appearance of the word in the early 19 th century - before small-towns were referred to as ‘towns’ or ‘cities’ and thus did not ‘exist’ - marks their roles as antidotes to transience, uprooting, migration which appeared as signifiers of American dynamism and progress. More generally the small town is a place marked by stillness, a place detached from the agitation of the world. As such it remains sheltered from the tensions of the ‘greater world,’ the world ‘outside.’ The place seems to be largely self sufficient, and protected from many of the vices from ‘out there.’ No war, no racism there, only brotherhood. It is held in the tension between the two paradoxical faces of the 10 This political-military-industrial venture is probably one of the most telling of American history. It also exemplifies the systemic approach of Americans to venture capital and timing. The French, despite their real engineering expertise, were not capable of mustering and coordinating the proper means, and came too early as well. The American Small Town 179 word ‘identity’: same among ourselves, different from others. This canonical representation is still visible today in the stereotyped discourse of those who live in those small towns and try to justify their choice. 11 They speak in terms of well-being, quietness, safety, child protection, exactly the terms used in the 1940s and 1950s to describe suburbia, the space which replaced the Small Town in American imagination. These criteria of community have become all the more acute with the roughening of city life in the 60s. Some even speak today of the small town as a promising space for social ‘regeneration,’ recycling the very same vocabulary used three quarters of a century earlier. The revival that could not actually take place in the 1960s, despite the right mental frame, may now be possible thanks to the internet, the satellite and cell-phones. 12 But the Small Town, despite its numerous virtues, is a place marked by a central contradiction: it is the place where one wants to return in order to escape the suffering of the world, and at the same time that one must leave in order to live. Thus functional and sociological criteria are not as helpful as they seem. Robert and M.H. Lynd’s Middletown (1929), still a key study in the field despite its age, may offer us a key to the problem. The Lynds use the principle of “double constraint” to define the small town; they start with its preconceived image and check it against descriptions made through qualitative interviews, as the most important criteria defining the small appears to be self definition (see Lynd & Lynd). A small town is a town which defines itself as a small town. In other words it is a projective space, both internal and shared. Not surprisingly then, in the play Our Town, the set is only made of a few non descript pieces of furniture, a few chairs, a bench and a white wall. Each spectator must be able (and free) to invest the set for themselves. Little is needed to do so as they already possess this space within them, and any realistic rendering would hinder the projection. Consequently, one should turn to cultural artefacts in order to seize the true content of the concept. It would be fastidiuous and probably useless to list all the manifestations of the small town in mass media, especially Hollywood movies (see Levy). Two canonical examples such as It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) and Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, 1935) will suffice to see the stable, transgeneric character of the Small-Town expressed with great clarity. The demotic promise for one runs throughout Leo McCarey’s movie, in which an English butler, played by Charles Laughton, is lost by his master, an English Lord, to Americans at a poker game and has to follow them to America. There he undergoes a rebirth, literally a new birth of freedom, “a birth as a new man,” as he himself formulates it. One of the pivotal scenes of 11 One could quote this declaration by a nurse from Belleville, TX (ca. 2000), who reads as an archetypal portrait of the small town (“Living in a Small Town”). 12 See <http: / / www.morris.umn.edu, http: / / www.morris.umn.edu/ services/ cst/ pubs/ 2007/ MNpreservationist.pdf> (accessed 21 April 2009). J EAN K EMPF 180 the movie is when Ruggles displays his better knowledge of Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg, he the Englishman who can recite it by heart when the ‘true’ Americans cannot. ‘Genuine vs. artificial,’ ‘true vs. false,’ ‘surface vs. deep-seated qualities,’ and, beyond, ‘genetically inherited qualities vs. those build through education and character,’ or to put it simpler ‘heredity vs. deeds.’ 13 All these are dialectical couples that permeate and structure the movie, and that replace the traditional ‘good vs. evil’ dichotomy precisely because they are at the core of the ‘small town’ message. In America, as it were, blood does not run thicker than water. The message is a little less straightforward but similar in a late avatar of small-town nostalgia, Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), or in the play Our Town already quoted. What characterizes the story in these two works is that the dead - who have died too young - retrospectively tell their own story, thus producing an effect of ‘future of the past’ - a manner of ‘that-will-havebeen’ to paraphrase Roland Barthes’s famous “that has been”. 14 This narrative device operates a separation between two time-spaces, on the one hand that of death - the common and timeless lot of humanity -, and on the other hand that of these moments of intense ‘small town mania,’ a present made of uncertainty if not clear depression. But solace can be brought by a ‘space in between,’ that of the small town, or rather its mere evocation as the issue is not so much to recover it as to cherish it as a melancoly nostalgic memory. The fact that this happens through images is not insignificant. The scopic pulsion (or the gaze) carries the present self into the otherness of the past. These images blur the limits between viewer and image without ever erasing it completely (or it would become an hallucination), and propose a dream which combines itself to the actuality of the present. The process, however, remains conscious, as nostalgia results from the advent of the conscience of the past object, of the end of its ‘naturalness’ and its transformation into a ‘monument.’ The verism of photographs is an obvious powerful incentive towards nostalgia (the already quoted longing for Barthes’s “that has been”), but it happens in other visual images as well. For instance in trompe l’oeils whose critical and public success was never higher than in times of major social and economic changes (as in the last two decades of the 19 th century in the US), or in Norman Rockwell’s paintings (and magazine covers), characterized by their extreme figuration harnessed in the service of the construction of a stabilized eternal Americanness in times of upheaval, creating a continuity from bad times to good times. 15 The Farm Security Administration (1935-1942) also produced photographs that are laden with this nostalgic effect. It is famous for images of 13 See my “‘And what did Lincoln say at Gettysburg? ’” (1995). 14 See Barthes (section 46, 113). Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters is built on the same principle. It is a series of free-verse monologues of dead citizens of a Midwestern town who speak from the grave of their lives in melancholy and nostalgic tone. 15 On trompe l’oeil, see Cook; Frankenstein. On Norman Rockwell, see Halpern. The American Small Town 181 displaced farmers and poor tenants, but a large part of its collection is actually of small-town images. 16 Roy Stryker, its initiator and director, even kept the Small Town as an on-going sub-project which he cared particularly about. Representing the Small Town in photographs, however, is a serious challenge. For how does one represent concepts, ways of life, social relations in photographs? Bertolt Brecht, who was highly concerned with those issues, and lived in a time when the photographic image became ubiquitous, once commented about a picture of the AEG plant, and its incapacity to propose a true understanding of the reality underlying the outside form of the buildings. 17 The same problem face those who, like Roy Stryker, are after ‘the true spirit of America’ through images of its small towns. The main motifs of the FSA images of small towns are order, safety, human scale and community. Views are made at eye level, strongly reminiscent of the gaze of the passers-by, the person walking in the street, shots are close enough but not too close. Togetherness is represented by social intercourse in streets, bars, shops, and by gatherings in churches, parties, picnics, etc., mixing simple people of various ages. They form an archetype of the American community, the fountainhead of democracy, and the basis of the body politic. But as commentators have often noted, such community is and remains staunchily white, thus clearly reinforcing the idea that such harmony can either be obtained among whites, or in a racially homogeneous environment (see Kidd; Natanson). Notwithstanding the ethnic and racial variable, these small towns are the perfect embodiement of John Dewey’s conception of community. 18 For Dewey the local level was where values are constructed within the individual, where public and private good are articulated. Such process requires a specific space: the space of the face-to-face intercourse, of which the small-town was one, together with the company and the school. Its loss leaves a gap between the basic unit - the family - and the abstract unit of the nation, creating an existential crisis. The motif of the “new electronic hearth” - the radio and later the television - was a way of imagining the possible recreation of this link. But the global village, however one looks at it, remains an oxymoron. To compensate for its inevitable disappearance, Rexford Tugwell, and several New Deal programs, tried on the one hand to reconstruct it in reality but artificially through feats of social engineering of varying success: restructured neighborhoods, relief camps, and the famous ‘garden cities,’ new model towns forming an intermediate community between the small town and suburbia. 19 16 These images are available from the Library of Congress site: <http: / / memory.loc.gov/ ammem/ awhhtml/ awpnp6/ fsa_owi.html> (accessed 1 May 2010). 17 Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”(1931), a remark originally made in Literarische Welt 2 Oct. 1931. 18 Rexford Tugwell, Roy Stryker’s boss, had studied under John Dewey. 19 Among them, Greenbelt, MD, and Jersey Homesteads, NJ, would be the best known ones. On those cities as seen by the FSA, see Curtis; Knepper; Williamson, ed. J EAN K EMPF 182 This is probably why the photographers were so excited when they could actually discover an ‘untouched,’ ‘original’ small town, a conservatory - like the national parks - of a sort of prelapsarian, pristine space of the American Pastoral, their own form of Shangri La. Walker Evans saw the same thing in the Civil War monuments he photographed in Vicksburg in 1936: they are literally petrified moments of a glorious past, a golden age of parades affected by neither time nor death, but definitely past. 20 As with the Ur small town, they are scenes frozen in a moment of their history, a moment which did not ignore modernity but kept it at bay. For there is the very secret of the space of the Small Town, a space combining, in the mind, proximity and distance, accepting the benefits of industry while eschewing its ills, a space that Thomas Jefferson described as Virginia in the 18 th century, the middle space of the pastoral and measure. 21 Combining the best of both worlds, however, does not go costless: living without making choices and thus without being accountable for them, benefitting from the world without having to pay for it, is a typical childhood fantasy, the childhood of the American project as much as that of the viewer of photographs. 22 Childhood is a powerful locus for (adult) nostalgia if only because it is both irremediably passed and ceaselessly structuring the adult and participating in his psychic life. Focusing on the Small Town and choosing it as a model is a way of freeing oneself from the constraints and responsibility of the present. It is reaching back to a moment of order in an unstable world, it is a dream of simple things in a complex world. In 1935, it was a way of going back to the 1890-1910 period, a period full of promises, despite the closing of the Frontier, a world of new beginnings (“a country of beginnings” wrote Emerson of the US 23 ). Not surprisingly, Walt Disney designed and organized Disneyland around a dreamed reconstitution of the Main Streets from his childhood (see Francaviglia 145-66). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as perils were building up in Europe, and while the USA, despite its attitude of active repeated denegation, could less and less escape the responsibility that goes with economic adulthood, the imagined Small Town was a perfect way of solving the contradictions and difficulties of the present through nostalgia, a space subtracting the individual from the reality principle - at least temporarily so. This ‘childhood fantasy’ has a long history in the United States. In the last third of the 19 th century, the imaginary conception of American space rapidly shifted, under clear and yet paradoxical demographic factors. While the wilderness had been taken for granted for much of the century - more as a reservoir of ‘voidness’ and a good pretext for expansion - it came back as a very 20 Images available at <http: / / memory.loc.gov/ ammem/ awhhtml/ awpnp6/ fsa_owi. html> (accessed 19 May 2010). 21 See in particular “Query XVIII.” Cf. Marx. 22 If one follows Barthes’s hypothesis on the noeme of photography, see Camera Lucida. 23 “Lecture before the Mercantile Library Association” & “The Young American.” The American Small Town 183 strong motif, culminating, on the beginning of the last decade of the century, first with the preservationist and conservationist movements then in historiography with Turner’s hypothesis. 24 In this light, I would suggest that the image of the ‘plantation’ in the post-Reconstruction era, when for all intents and purposes it had disappeared, can be seen as but another version of the same system which constructed the Small Town (see Aiken). The Small Town was obviouly constructed first and foremost against the (very big) city, a new sort of American artefact which was emerging after the mid-19 th century. 25 In 1830 the largest American city was New York City with a population of 200,000 and the second was Baltimore with only 80,000. In 1840, four cities had a population of around 100,000, in 1850, seven and the larger ones had a population of between 120,000 and 500,000 (New York City). In 1860 nine of them passed the 100,000 mark, with four above 200,000 (and Brooklyn emerged as the second American city). In 1870 there were fifteen and eight above 200,000, and in 1880 there were twenty with ten above 200,000. By 1890, there were 29 above 100,000, three of which passed the million, and all in all twelve above 200,000. The progression was geometric and what emerged between 1880 and 1910 was a new bipolar system which was in itself a system of differentiation of the political space. On the one hand the return of the plantation culture (still emblematic of an old feudal order based on land and connecting the American South to Latin America and Europe) where the organizing principle was the ubiquity of the master’s eye and hand, and on the other the big city, where dwellers had lost control on space: the city was beyond grasp at a glance and was less and less ‘walkable.’ The body - whether the eye of the foot - cannot master it, urban space is fragmented, piecemeal and would soon become even absurdly meaningless - or be seen so. In this system, the Small Town occupies this famous middle space, a middle space which possessed its organizing principle reinterpreted in a fresh way through the idea of the pastoral, as described by Crevecoeur in the Nantucket Letters from an American Farmer. This idea, I would argue, constituted the 18 th century basis for the ‘small town’ concept of the 20 th . 26 One of the central defining characters of the pastoral is that it is not evolutive but cyclical, synchronized on seasonal variations and thus epitomizes balance. 27 This could be found in England’s Golden Age, Merry Old England, and formed the model which sustained the North American concept of the 24 On the Conservation Movement, see Hays. Cf. Nash; Turner; Worster, ed. 25 <http: / / www.census.gov/ population/ www/ documentation/ twps0027/ twps0027. html> (June 1998): 23 June 2010. 26 For a most interesting analysis of the pastoral, see James L. Machor’s study Pastoral Cities. Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (94-99). 27 This closeness to nature is to be taken in an intellectual sense, as the town, however small is an urban environement, ie a protection against the basic violence of nature, a condition American settlers experienced first hand for centuries and that still constitutes a fundamental condition of the North American continent. J EAN K EMPF 184 Small Town, especially in its New England embodiement. This is particularly visible in the way the American small town recycles many of the components of this fantasy period, to translate them into the American idiom. The most obvious adaptation to the American soil is the primacy of self expression over social deference, or in other words the replacement of the squire by the demotic character. The reconstruction of the American space by way of the generic small town thus appears as a particular way of acclimatizing a European habitus while making it simultaneously a gauge of the New World successful change (the triumph of democracy construed as the emancipation of the economically dynamic classes and the formation of a new social order) and a conservatory of Old world wisdom (order). The space so created is subtracted from the actual time and space, from the hic and nunc, in an eternal present and reconfigured into a stable narrative (a museum, as it were). ‘Merry Old England’ just as much as ‘Happy New America’ are then characterized by harmony replacing social violence and conflict, a necessary condition for a free market to develop, through the imposition of a cultural order presented as natural. 28 As such, I would suggest that the Small Town in American psyche belongs to what Eric Hobsbawm called the invention of tradition or Pierre Nora loci memoriae, “places of memory” (Hobsbawm & Ranger; cf. Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire). Nora describes loci memoriae as objects that combine three qualities - they are material (or actual), functional and symbolic - and that articulate memory and history within a social frame. In the case of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the Small Town thus appears as a very timely ‘invention,’ while urbanization and industrialization progressed quickly and ruthlessly as regards earlier modes of life especially in the countryside, displacing thousands of farmers in a huge process of domestic migration almost equivalent in scope to international migration to the United States. The character of the 1920s as a decade which witnessed if not the emergence at least the establishment of modernity is not to be discussed here as it has been widely studied. The problem is essentially that this transformation made the United States into a ‘nation among others,’ a process even furthered by its involvement in the Great War, despite the subsequent pas-de-deux made by the Senate, which might have been less the sign of rabid isolationism per se as of a return of exceptionalism, later manifested by the waves of hundredpercent Americanism in the 1920s. This is why I would like to propose the American Small Town made into a locus memoriae as one of the best candidates for the role of syncretic agent, reconciling development with stasis with a place embodying the values of a democracy based on community and a vivid agrarian project. One sees how different such a concept is from that of the French terroir, a territory with a powerful human identity defining an origin (in particular for 28 Social Darwinism is a good example of this process of representation/ explanation of society. The American Small Town 185 produce). Rather than a hic (the terroir), the Small Town is a nunc (the eternal present of the idea), specific and generic at the same time with its identitybestowing function. Not surprisingly then the New Deal got very interested in the small towns, or rather in the spirit of the Small Town. For the New Deal was less a political revolution than a moment of cultural strengthening, a manner of adaptation of cultural structures to the economic revolution of the 1920s, with its massification, depersonalization, and acceleration of exchanges. And the small town was thus construed less as a model to be replicated in reality than as the idea to be brandished of an eternal America, fixed in the balance of the ideal moment and yet capable of progress. It can be seen as a space embodying a consciously retrospective and nostalgic glance towards a usable past, as Van Wyck Brooks put it in 1918, or reconciling the two tensions Lawrence Levine saw in American culture when he said that Americans loved progress but were afraid of change. The moment of the New Deal is not unique in American history, but it is particularly significant in the way it shaped this ‘reconstruction of the American space’ through the Small Town figure. In those years following the explosion of modernity in the 1920s and preceding the urban / suburban reorganization of the post-war era, the New Deal shows us how the Small Town can be seen as a pastoral space construed as therapeutical artefact. Observing its deployment (in representation of course), it appears to function on the principle of nostalgia which constitutes a controled pain to allow the absorption of social change. Such choice was not costless, however. While it eased the transformation of society, it did it at the cost of a blind spot, or of a ‘fantastic fallacy,’ not unlike what the Frontier had been for the previous generation. J EAN K EMPF 186 Works Cited Aiken, Charles S. The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. 2 May 2010 <http: / / bartleby.com/ 156>. Baker, Alan R.H., and Gideon Biger. 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Transformations in the Perception of the Environment F RANK M EHRING Tourism of Doom: In Search of Hemingway’s “Snow” on Kilimanjaro in the New Millennium Like no other American artist, Ernest Hemingway has left his literary footprint on the iconic summit of Kilimanjaro. Hemingway’s admiration for the African region attracted worldwide curiosity. With “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Hemingway inspired readers to follow on his heels to face the essentials of life, either by means of an aesthetic transfer in the act of reading or quite literally by hiring a travel guide from Tanzania. Today, you can book a “Last Frontier Expedition” with Hemingway Tours & Safaris, buy “adventure clothes” from the Hemingway Travel Collection, and start your climb of Kilimanjaro at the Hemingway base camp, staying in a “tented accommodation [that] is luxuriously comfortable and spacious with en-suite bathrooms and ... naturally, fully and tastefully furnished,” as the website promises. 1 Ken Shapiro, editor of a travel magazine, has identified a trend labeled “tourism of doom” which encourages visits to endangered sites 2 like Kilimanjaro’s shrinking ice cap. Hemingway’s short story regains prominence within this new cultural context of global warming, enabling us to ask if and how the reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” today could activate an ecocritical attitude in the reader. In addition, one might ask why Hemingway’s African encounters are so effective in triggering a positive response to an unlikely hero such as Harry who constantly quarrels, drinks, and blames others for his shortcomings. This article will analyze Hemingway’s African encounters by emphasizing the literary strategies he used to authenticate cultural curiosity. This analysis will reveal a hidden frame of false promises played out between urban memories and constructions of an African wilderness. Methodologically, I will combine a Rortian reading of Hemingway’s African encounters with recent theories of ecocriticism. By tapping into the rich resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory my reading will put to test whether, as Lawrence Buell suggests, the power of imaginative literature can foster a climate of “transformed environmental values, perception and will” (Buell vi). 1 6. Aug. 2010 <http: / / www.kirurumu.com/ camps_and_lodges/ Hemingway%27s%20 Camp.htm>. 2 30 July 2010 <http: / / www.smh.com.au/ travel/ endangered-sites-see-boom-in-tourismof-doom-20090206-7zbv.html> F RANK M EHRING 192 Stereotypes and Means of Redemption Texts can only answer those questions that have been put to them, and they can only answer them “as best they can” (Bode 89). Each generation, however, asks different questions. In the wake of the “ethical turn” 3 proposed at the end of the 1980s, ethical questions such as “How ought one live? ” and “What ought I to do? ” have been applied to literary texts by theoreticians such as Richard Rorty (1931-2007). Focusing on the interaction between text and reader, Rorty optimistically recognizes the process of reading imaginative literature as a starting point for a revolution or - in more modest terms - at least a change in the reader, helping him to become “a more sensitive, more knowledgeable, wiser person” (“Redemption” 244). Because Hemingway was such a popular and authoritative figure in his time, the constructed answer to the question “How ought one to live? ” (as extracted from his cosmopolitan texts) defined, to a certain degree, the contemporary standard of how a man (of that period) is supposed to live. How does today’s reader - the twenty -first century individual who faces the question “How ought I to live? ” - relate to an American writer repeatedly described as chauvinist, racist, anti-Semitic and, in general, an immoral expatriate? 4 And when readers tend to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between biography and work, how can this question of self-improvement be applied to his writing? 5 I would like to advocate a Rortian reading of Hemingway’s “African” texts because in this kind of reading the text is not reduced to the status of a tool or a fluid mass that can be molded into any form desired by the critic or biographer. 6 Rather, with Kurt Müller I argue for an “attitude of respect for 3 The return of ethics into literary studies has been proposed at the end of the 1980s by philosophers such as Rorty, Eldridge or Nussbaum. In literature, scholars such as Booth and Harpham have been crucial in re-introducing ethics to literary analysis. 4 See Aiken 4, Lynn 242 ff., and Fiedler (65-117). 5 If the ongoing concern with ethics is indeed what Theo D’haen calls in Freudian terms “the return of the repressed” (195), the question of what is fresh and productive in the current debate remains. More concretely: what kind of new insight can be gained from Hemingway’s African writings? After postmodernism’s non-functional and playful approach to literature in the laboratory of literary criticism it comes as no surprise that the pendulum swings in a different direction where a renewed interest in the outside world unavoidably leads to a discussion of moral issues. Literary scholars, however, should not work, in the words of Patrick Parrinder, “in an artistic vacuum” when they proclaim yet another “theoretical revolution” (13). When in close contact with literary objects, theory and criticism can be used as tools to illuminate ethical concerns. 6 To apply a Rortian approach to Hemingway’s African encounters, the critic needs to overcome the powerful psychoanalytic paradigm introduced by Philip Young more than fifty years ago. According to Young’s so-called “wound theory,” Hemingway’s life and art were motivated by the trauma of his injuries in World War I. With this psychological construct, Young is able to identify a recurring “code hero” who displays “grace under pressure” as he adheres to a discipline of honor and courage. In a “life of tension and pain” these principles “make a man a man and distinguish him from the people who fol- Tourism of Doom 193 the aesthetic autonomy of the work of art” (“Modernist” 318). In the case of Hemingway, this requires us to free ourselves from the stereotypes Hemingway’s biographers have heaped onto the protagonists of his fiction. Following Winfried Fluck’s and Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics, I will apply an ethics of reading, combining it with Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatic theory of reading in order to re-evaluate the literary figure of Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” This approach generates a number of new questions regarding Hemingway’s oeuvre. According to Rorty, novels offer a “means of redemption from selfsatisfaction” (qtd. in “Der Roman” 49). Instead of only asking how something is said in order to trace back the moral effect in the reader’s response, I ask how the protagonists interact with and within their cultural environment. It will become quite apparent that Hemingway’s protagonists are not only incurious and inattentive “to anything irrelevant to [their] obsession about their cruelty towards other people” (Rorty, Contingency 163). They also tend to be oblivious towards cultural encounters in Austria, France, Italy, Spain, or various regions in Africa. A critical scrutiny of the protagonists’ selfcenteredness in Hemingway’s African writings will lead the reader to a heightened awareness of cultural differences. What implications does such a reading hold for interpreting transcultural encounters? This question seems to me also relevant to Rorty’s effort to focus on cultural incuriosity and its ethical implications. 7 In such an investigation, imaginative literature can play a key role. Rorty’s concept of the “liberal ironist,” who has “continuing doubts” about his means of expression and communication (Contingency 73), challenges the reader to question the self-stylizations of, for example, the code heroes in Hemingway’s African stories. Thus, cultural environments in both fiction and the reader’s personal sphere become interlinked. From this perspective, literature holds an ethical potential to make us more sensitive to our fellow creatures as well as to the environment. It is by causing us to rethink our judgments of particular people that imaginative literature does most to help us break with our own pasts. The resulting liberation may, of course, lead one to try to change the political or economic or religious or low random impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps cowardly, and without inviolable rules for how to live holding tight” (Young 63). Young’s persuasive concept of the “code hero” made it difficult for subsequent critics “to approach Hemingway in any other fashion” (Beegel 277). 7 In “Humiliation and Solidarity,” Rorty accused those American fellow-citizens who supported President Bush’s war against Iraq of being incurious regarding global issues. With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Rorty agrees that Europe must counterbalance the American hegemony in order to strive for a global confederation. He calls on Europe to activate a kind of idealism that America has lost. Namely, to create a cosmopolitan order based on the international law (Völkerrecht) and to defend that idealism against competing agendas. This might also be a starting point for a critical approach to Frederic Henry’s fight for the Italian war effort in World War I in A Farewell to Arms (1929) or Robert Jordan’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). F RANK M EHRING 194 philosophical status quo. Such an attempt may begin a lifetime of effort to break through the received ideas that serve to justify present-day institutions. But it also may result merely in one’s becoming a more sensitive, more knowledgeable, wiser person. (“Redemption” 244) In the following pages, I will trace back various aspects of cultural (in)curiosity in Hemingway’s African encounters to reveal the potential of a Rortian reading. Instead of trying to counter-balance the familiar image of Hemingway as the ethnocentric, white racist and male chauvinist, I would like to emphasize a hidden discourse on cultural indifference ingrained in Hemingway’s African stories. Cultural (In)Curiosity In “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway tells the story of Harry, an American writer, and his wife, Helen, who go on a hunting safari in East Africa. Due to an infection in his leg, Harry faces death. While Harry and Helen wait for a rescue plane, past events of Harry’s life unfold before his inner eye, revealing the critical self-reflection of a celebrated author on the loss of his artistic stamina. Harry quarrels with his wife in order to blame her, her money, and their excessive drinking for his stifled creativity and feeling of “emasculation.” Helen is cast as “this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent” (60). Memories of the “dark continent” represent the happiest days of their lives (probably a period of love and creativity). The dialogues with Helen reveal the motivation for going to Africa: to enable the writer whose work has become as “rotten” as his infected wound to “work the fat off his soul” (60). Facing death, Harry remembers several stories he would have liked to write. Set apart by italics, these vignettes exemplify Harry’s artistic talents to the reader. Biographers and scholars have repeatedly pointed out the close correlation between Harry’s self-condemnation and Hemingway’s own increasing anxieties about his drinking, his status as a writer, and his literary fame: the critics had mostly disliked his recent Death in the Afternoon (1932) and had “killed” Green Hills of Africa (1935; see Selected Letters 426). 8 Jeffrey Meyers quotes Hemingway’s depressed statement of January 1936, expressing fears of “impotence, inability to write, insomnia” and suicide, and argues that this, combined with the “violent and bitter break with Jane [Mason] in April 1936” led to misogynist feelings (252). Feminist discourse has also used the two African stories to shed light on Hemingway’s own personality. Rena Sander- 8 See for example Fleming 76-83. Friedman has recently pointed out and summarized the textual overlapping between Hemingway’s biography and the artistic integrity of Harry in his essay “Harry or Ernest? ” (359-373). See also the correspondence between Hemingway and his editor regarding disappointing reports about Green Hills of Africa and the reception history of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (rpt. in Bruccoli 222-241). Tourism of Doom 195 son, for example, argues that with these fictive “bitches” (Margot and Helen), Hemingway is “attacking not only or primarily the woman but rather male passivity and dependence on women - traits he found in himself” (185). The Harry/ Hemingway identification has been so strong that Hemingway biographer Kenneth Lynn even suggested that Hemingway used the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a means to rehearse his own future death and its aftermath (431). This enduring emphasis on psychology and biography shows that issues of place and the dichotomy of city and nature, featured so prominently in the flashbacks, have hardly been addressed. The matters of cultural (in)curiosity in the African stories, as well as the discrepancy between Harry’s rhetoric about the healing powers of Africa and his status as a tourist, have also been neglected. Wilderness, Urban Life, and African Encounters In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the American artist seeks a sense of transcendental harmony. For him (as well as for the leopard), the rhetorical evocation of a sacred, mythic wilderness outside the American historical context comes at a price: death. In his African narratives, Hemingway transfers the American concept of “wilderness” (as a constructed textual entity) to the African continent and blends it with elements of the frontier myth. 9 Harry embodies the traditional frontiersman who, in the sense of Richard Slotkin, allegedly escaped “from civilization and its discontents” (Slotkin 86) driven by his love for the spirit of the wilderness. However, the construction of wilderness in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” reproduces the very values and social situation from which Harry tried to escape. Harry hopes that “Africa” and “Kilimanjaro” will cure his literary flabbiness, but the alltoo familiar quarrels with his wife an integral part of his tense, overmodernized life-style in various cities in Europe come back to haunt him. 10 His memories of those cities, and of his life in those cities (exemplified in the flashbacks) also keep him from opening his senses to the African environment. The epigraph of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” offers an entry into Hemingway’s concept of wilderness and the literary construction of his African encounters. Critics have juxtaposed the “dried and frozen carcass” of the leopard with Harry’s rotting leg (e.g., Waldhorn 145) and have generally agreed that there is a parallel between the impulse which spurred the leopard’s search and the artist’s drive to reach the unattainable. Moral and artistic 9 Of course, Harry is no modern day Daniel Boone or carrier of myth-narratives about the process of leaving the imprints of civilization on the ‘untouched’ American soil. However, Harry recreates the excitement of facing natural forces, overcoming ‘wilderness,’ and laying claim on Kilimanjaro - if only for himself. 10 Eco-historian William Cronin has equated “wilderness” with a “flight from history” and an “escape from responsibility” (484-485). F RANK M EHRING 196 corruption, the metaphor of the rotten body, the vultures, and the hyena form a chain of motifs bespeaking mortality, decay, and death (Müller, Der Mensch 123), against which the story has been hailed as a positive symbol of the artist exorcising his inner demons through his own imagination and his striving for perfectibility. 11 I would like to undermine this assumption by unmasking the drama of cultural indifference which has been part of other transcultural encounters in books such as The Sun Also Rises (1926), Death in the Afternoon (1932), and Green Hills of Africa (1935) a drama of cultural indifference that culminates in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The epigraph suggests a keen interest in a particular geographic location, as well as familiarity with the religious beliefs of the Masai and with their language. “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude” (“52). From this, two questions emerge: First, how thorough is Hemingway’s interest in the cultural “other”? Hemingway might simply have taken the information on Kilimanjaro from Samler A. Brown’s The South and East African Year Book (published in 1933), which was in his personal library in Key West (Brasch and Sigman 336). One passage provides almost verbatim the information Hemingway used for his epigraph. It says that “Kibo, the western summit, is called by the Masai ‘Ngàje Ngài’ the House of God. The highest point of this summit was first reached by Prof. Hans Mayer and Ludwig Purtscheller in 1889” (Brown 307). Other elements might also, and just as easily, have been gleaned from contemporary publications. The reference to the leopard, for instance, might have been taken from an article which the English mountaineer Donald Latham wrote for the Geographical Journal in December 1926 entitled “Kilimanjaro.” Latham is the one who discovered the mummified corpse of a leopard. He wrote that a “remarkable discovery was the remains of a leopard, sundried and frozen, right at the crater rim. The beast must have wandered there and died of exposure” (qtd. in Stewart 87). The spot later became known as ‘Leopard Point.’ In terms of content, then, the information presented in the epigraph was easily obtainable from contemporary sources, and does not, as is often assumed, indicate that Hemingway had intimate knowledge of or sympathy for local languages, beliefs, or geography. A second question is: what creative strategies are used to introduce the reader to the exotic locale? Hemingway brings together several stylistic ele- 11 The final scene leads Harry to the “House of God,” the summit of Kilimanjaro and, despite its dream-like quality, allows him to have a triumphant epiphany. Critics overemphasized the elaborate psychological struggle and dramatic power which Hemingway derives from dissolving the orderly pattern of chronological time and the fragmented memories interspersed as interior monologues throughout the story. Here, the reader gets a glimpse of Harry as a man of “undeniable sensitivity, passionately alive to people, places and experience” (Waldhorn 145). Tourism of Doom 197 ments (including journalism, guidebook information, and poetic reduction) which are important for a successful aesthetic transfer with imaginations of “Africa” at the center. The literary products of these discourses have been part of Hemingway’s oeuvre since his Paris years, when he struggled to access another culture, become immersed in it, and then exploit it for creative purposes. Hemingway prided himself on being a connoisseur of French culture, and the American tourist industry has accepted him as such, issuing guidebooks to Hemingway’s Paris, its bars, drinks and cuisine. The text of his first Paris-based book, however, offers many clues to reveal the superficiality of this French-American ‘love affair.’ For example, in an ironic performance of notoriously conservative moralists, Bill teaches Jake about the moral fallout of being an expatriate: such a person is in limbo, out of touch with his home country, unable to grow roots, escaping from one alien nation to another. “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil […]. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.” Jake’s response reveals a cynic approval of such a lack of cultural communication and curiosity: “It sounds like a swell life” (The Sun Also Rises 115). In that novel, the European continent served as a metaphor for being dislocated. Later, “Africa” becomes another literary objet trouvé which Hemingway used for similar purposes. In this he is not alone. Particularly since the Harlem Renaissance, American flâneurs, flappers, intellectuals, and artists have fantasized about African culture as a rich reservoir of tropes, ideas, and imaginary spaces which might inject American modernism with a stimulating dose of energy. 12 Alain Locke’s founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), Langston Hughes’s blues poetry, Paul Robeson’s iconic embodiment of the leading role in Eugene O’Neill’s drama Emperor Jones (1920), Aaron Douglas’s murals on Aspects of Negro Life (1934-36), and a host of jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong catered to white fantasies about the African jungle, primitivism, and the allegedly authentic vitality of antiurban, pre-civilized forms of life. Cole Porter’s song, “Find me a Primitive Man,” points both towards the jazz craze and the obsession with fantasies of primitivist modernist art. The reference to Cole Porter’s popular musical comedy Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929) set in Paris reminds Harry of his own failures to come close to “the real thing” - a trope Hemingway introduced as 12 As Lemke points out, Hemingway worked the white fascination with “primitivist modernism” into the protagonist Catherine in The Garden of Eden (1986). When Catherine tries to make herself “darker and darker” she tries to achieve two purposes: to distinguish herself from other white people in her social surroundings, and to become more sexually attractive to her husband. With reference to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark it becomes clear that the underlying function of such references to blackness and the fictional fabrication of a black persona becomes a projection of “white desire and fear” (Lemke 10). F RANK M EHRING 198 a goal of all artistic endeavors in Death in the Afternoon (2), published in 1932 before he left for his African safari the following year. Not surprisingly, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” uses The Sun Also Rises (the quintessential story of the American fantasy of and fascination with Paris) as a metatext. Having explored various spaces and places all across Europe, Harry tries to tap into the vaunted African energy promoted by the American mass media in the wake of the mass migration of African-Americans from the southern states to the North, in the second part of the 19 th century, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of World War I. That migration invested the metropolitan city in the North with a glorious whiteness that became a symbol of freedom in the African American imagination - as can be seen, for example, in Douglas’s idealized “the City” (see figure 1), which places factories and skyscrapers on the square top of a hill from which light radiates to the aspiring people in the lower spheres. In an ironic turn, Hemingway invested the image of the highest mountain in Africa with a similar mythological whiteness, turning it into a place of redemption for white urban travellers. 13 Hemingway seems to return to the metaphysical framework of the African setting which informed Douglas’s artistic vocabulary. While Douglas emphasizes education and work as a means for African Americans to move from bondage to urban freedom, Hemingway places a literate but unproductive urban dweller at the foot of the highest African mountain. The Changing Function of “Africa” In the 1920s, European towns evolved as a trope and escapist landmark for young American artists looking for affordable entertainment, amusement, and transatlantic adventures. The allegedly primitive world of “Africa” held similar promises for wealthy travellers. Hemingway’s fascination with travelling into exotic countries and big game hunting follows Theodore Roosevelt’s popular travel account, African Game Trails, which popularized the notion of “Africa” as a new frontier for Americans and which Hemingway owned (Brasch and Sigman 318). 14 After seeing the snowy summit of Kilimanjaro, Roosevelt envisaged “Africa” as a kind of New World “of high promise for settlers of white race” (30). Hemingway was equally impressed with the 13 Douglas’s murals Aspects of Negro Life on which he worked since 1933 were exhibited at the Texas World Fair at the same time Hemingway’s two famous short stories about his African encounters appeared. 14 The book’s subtitle, An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist, resonates with the notion that by the beginning of the 20 th century, adventurers, explorers, and other culturally curious intellectuals would find challenges in Africa similar to those encountered by the early discoverers of the New World such as Columbus or Vasco da Gama. Roosevelt claimed that in British East Africa Americans might encounter the “spectacle of a high civilization all at once thrust into and superimposed upon a wilderness of savage men and beasts” (1). Tourism of Doom 199 promise of a new and vast country. However, for Hemingway’s protagonist the African encounter proves to be more ambivalent. For Harry, “Africa” functions as an antidote to the enervating and finally destructive rich (American) people with whom he has been spending most of his time: “Africa was where he had been happiest in the good time of his life, so he had come out here to start again” (“Snows” 59). Where does this satisfaction with Africa come from? One is tempted to argue that the intricacies of hunting, the African wildlife, the exotic landscape, the many tribes with their specific cultural practices, languages, and music provided a rich source of inspiration, a fine antidote to the deadening habits and decorum of the nouveaux riches from which he had escaped. But Harry seems less concerned with these matters than with his own well-being. Like a boxer training for the next season, he simply chose a remote location to try to regain his original fitness. To be sure, the safari was initiated with “the minimum of comfort” as Harry indicates in one of his inner monologues (“Snows” 60). Nevertheless, he ad- Fig. 1: Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: Aspiration, 1934-36. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm). F RANK M EHRING 200 mits that “There was no hardship” either (60). Hemingway puts special emphasis on Harry’s well-being and comfort, mentioning the “personal boy” constantly at his disposal to fulfil every wish (59). Harry and Helen display imperialistic attitudes towards their African companions - and not cultural curiosity. The reader, as Debra Moddelmog has pointed out, easily becomes complicit in the colonial relationship and attitude of domination and subjugation (136). Language functions as a tool to define the geographic and cultural environment. However, like Jake in Paris, Hemingway’s Harry is unfamiliar with the local language. 15 This language barrier marks Harry as a cultural outsider who has mastered only those key words necessary for issuing commands to his Masai guides and carriers. What holds true for American visitors to Paris also applies to wealthy adventurers who book a hunting trip to Africa: “if suitable chosen, all the attendants will speak English,” as a recent guide to Africa (ungrammatically) assures its would-be customers. Indeed, a glossary of places and vernacular expressions for Hemingway’s writings set in Africa would be quite short. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the vocabulary appears most often when Harry orders alcoholic beverages: “Molo! ” he shouted. “Yes Bwana.” “Bring whiskey-soda.” “Yes Bwana.” (“Snows” 54) Although the next line suggests moral ambiguity (his wife critically remarks “You shouldn’t”), it becomes quite clear that her remark does not refer to his bullying attitude or his shouting at the servants. Instead, she is concerned about the amounts of alcohol Harry consumes. Harry appears as a discontented racist and chauvinist who does not engage with the environment in any way. Instead of looking around him, Harry constantly ponders the past, recalling other places that he would have loved to immortalize in his fiction. The African setting never appears to hold any potential for an unwritten story. And his wife, despite her repeated insistence that she, too, “loved Africa” (62), shares her husband’s attitudes, up to and including his penchant for drink (which she has criticized): “’Molo, letti dui whiskey-soda! ’ she called” (63). Neither one of them recognizes their own or each other’s disconnectedness from the African socio-cultural and natural environment. 16 Instead, they spend most of their time arguing about themselves and their relationship and soothing their spirits with alcohol. 15 I have pointed out the linguistic barriers in more detail in my article “’You don’t know Paree! ’ Cultural Indifference” (337-360). 16 Mayer has detailed how Hemingway fashions a seemingly authentic travel experience into an African fantasy. Regarding the main protagonist in “The Short Happy Life,” she reconnects the white male with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes and thus strips Hemingway’s story of its realist African setting (248). Tourism of Doom 201 As Harry starts to realize, the promise of authenticity on a big hunt safari turns out to be both a false promise of the American tourist industry and a personal lie. “It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones” (59). “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” exemplifies the repetition of the same superficiality and lack of authentic cultural contacts in the flashbacks. “Africa” is yet another place which evokes, if anything, the same old set of emotional responses Harry had already experienced in his urban flashbacks. Thus, the juxtaposition of an “imaginary heaven” with an “African hell,” as Richard B. Larsen recently argued (45), does not really apply to the story. Hemingway’s “Africa” is as esoteric as the construction of a Christian heaven. Paradoxically, this African safari story is dominated by narratives set in non-African urban settings. The clever plot device of presenting Harry’s memories of other, better times allows Hemingway to introduce five striking vignettes, all of them set outside Africa. While any of the places mentioned in the flashbacks (Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Turkey and Spain) might serve as a foil, the prominent position of Paris is remarkable. The couple’s connection to Paris was established even before the first flashback, when Helen emphasizes the dissimilarities between their common time in Paris and the experience of being paralyzed at the foot of the Kilimanjaro: “You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.” (“Snows” 54) Hemingway elaborates on the metaphor of snow first introduced in the epigraph when Harry refers to the “snow on the mountains in Bulgaria,” the snow on Christmas day in Schrunz which “was so bright it hurt your eyes, or the “rush of running powders-snow on crust” in Bludenz (55-56). In the end, however, Harry’s mind returns to Paris. “’Where did we stay in Paris? ’ he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas chair, now, in Africa” (57). As if to remind the reader that the story is not set in Paris, Hemingway re-introduces “Africa.” While referring to the entire continent, the term functions as a trope to evoke remoteness from western civilization. Paris epitomizes the dream of civilization gone right from an American perspective. H.L. Mencken noted that despite extensive travels and academic credentials American intellectuals abroad are “far too dull […] to undertake so difficult an enterprise” as learning the foreign language (40). The same is true for Harry in Africa, where he is also and again a cultural outsider who describes the places he visits as if he were looking at a kitschy postcard retouched with bright colors. Consider his memory of Parisian street life: you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started F RANK M EHRING 202 and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad marc; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Café des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above. The Concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge, his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. (69) This trip down memory lane to Paris is followed by a reference to the successful American songwriter Cole Porter, who turned American escapist fantasies into hit Broadway plays: “Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you’re going mad for me” (“Snows” 71), Harry explains to Helen. Like Harry, Porter was a regular in the Café Society of Paris in the 1920s. In his 1929 “musical comedy tour of Paris” called Fifty Million Frenchmen, he tellingly wrote of American tourists and expatriates that they claim knowledge of Paris without having established any real ties with their cultural environment: You come to Paris, you come to play; You have a wonderful time, you go away. And, from then on, you talk of Paris knowingly; You may know Paris, you don’t know Paree. (Porter 344) The fourth flashback follows the reference to Porter and begins with a revealing insight: “No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written? ” (71). The well-constructed paradox sets up the dichotomy between writing about a cultural experience and at the same time admitting that it is based on the perspective of a cultural outsider. Earlier, Harry had talked about the return of his creative strength identifying the feeling as an illusion. His abilities to write about “Paris” or “Africa” respectively emerge as a white lie which allows him to continue working. “If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it” (45), Harry explains regarding his artistic talents. This reference foreshadows the rescue scene, which takes him closer to Mount Kilimanjaro. The one scene in which he finally hopes to attain a sense of purity and a sensuous overflow of powerful feelings turns out to be a hallucination of the dying artist. In a way, it is yet another lie of the writer when he continues the narration after his own death. In addition, the reader becomes the victim of a literary trick, which leads him to follow a false storyline. The final episode is the hidden sixth vignette without the graphical identification suggested by the italics. Thus, the overall structure of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” resembles an artistic confession. The story deconstructs the ongoing process of Harry’s self-delusion. While he blames Helen for all of his artistic failures, he admits at one time that she has indeed been “always thoughtful” (44) and caring. There is no one to blame for his artistic and physical numbness but himself: “He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by Tourism of Doom 203 betrayals of himself and what he believed in” (60). 17 The flashbacks are a last resort to drum up support for the many transcultural encounters he experienced during his travels. However, after the fifth and final flashback the trope of cultural curiosity emerges as yet another lie. 18 Considering the lack of curiosity in African cultures and spaces, it is ironic that Hemingway originally named the dying writer in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Henry Walden (Lynn 429), with an obvious nod to the patron saint of nature writing, Henry David Thoreau. The literary strategy of “Snows,” which juxtaposes the African experience with memories of urban life, reflects the dichotomy of city and nature which also plays out in Walden. 19 It emphasizes the tragic element encoded in Harry’s love for “Africa,” namely that he cannot escape his memories of urban life. Just as Thoreau ends his experiment in the ‘New England wilderness’ (which was actually only one and a half miles outside the city of Concord) by returning to his city life, Harry’s mental paralysis is doubled in physical space. Kilimanjaro, the object of his fascination, is always in clear sight, but rendered inaccessible by the spreading gangrene in his leg. Ironically, he can only hope to reach it through industrialization, by using complex machines that can transcend the limitations of the human body. Thus, the story’s central act of waiting for the plane (an icon of modernization, transportation, and liberation) constantly undermines Harry’s dedication to the promises of the African wilderness. In Green Hills of Africa Hemingway explains that he described wilderness in “an attempt to write an absolutely true book” (iii). “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” uses a fictional character to reveal the literary strategies employed in the construction of “Africa.” The façade of purity and authenticity starts to crumble right after the introduction of the epigraph and continues methodically with the five flashbacks. Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro” and the Tourist Industry In the course of the 20 th century, the earth has urbanized at an incredible speed. As urban sociologist Mike Davis explains, cities have absorbed nearly “two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950” (2). With the dynamics of urbanization and the creation of megacities with populations in 17 Another of his confessions revolves around the cultural curiosity he tried to sell as authentic in his many trips around the world. 18 “You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,” he said to her. “You’ve never lost anything. You’re the most complete man I’ve ever known.”/ “Christ,” he said. “How little a woman knows. What is that? Your intuition? ”/ Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath (74). 19 As Ross argues in her analysis of the Nick Adams stories set in Michigan, Hemingway relies on a mythic form of wilderness which in a Barthian sense is “parasitically empty” (24). His impoverished concept of wilderness becomes apparent in “The Big Two- Hearted River” where the fictive rendering of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan provides the backdrop for a paradoxical loss and regeneration of Nick Adams. F RANK M EHRING 204 excess of eight million or hypercities with more than twenty million inhabitants, comes the desire to leave these spatial confinements in order to confront more essential aspects of human life. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the frequent flashbacks to city life seem to suggest that no matter where the urban intellectual goes, he depends on and cannot free himself of “the city.” 20 Although Hemingway was not necessarily interested in improving the ecological quality of life in the cities, Harry’s dissatisfaction when he is in Africa, away from his urban environment, poses interesting questions about the relationships between urban and non-urban environments. For example: is it possible to assume an ecocritical attitude about Harry’s sojourn in Africa, in order to address question of ‘ecological footprints’? Do nature and city represent an antithesis or symbiosis in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”? 21 It is crucial to understand that Hemingway turns to the quintessential constituent of city-life to describe the aesthetic experience of “Kilimanjaro”: the house. The mountain top, the mythological “House of God,” recalls the mystique and symbolic status which Harlem had for the “New Negro” who was migrating from the South to the brightly lit northern “city on the hill,” as depicted by Aaron Douglas in “Aspiration” (see ill. 1). Many other works worked the same theme, transforming “the city” into a metaphor of selfdiscovery, like James Weldon Johnson’s “Black Manhattan,” Alain Locke’s “Mecca of the New Negro,” and Langston Hughes’ “Racial Mountain.” This (African-American) experience is also at the center of Hemingway’s story about the imaginary flight towards the top of Kilimanjaro. If fictive literature has, as Lawrence Buell asserts, “the power to draw its readers into its imagined scenes affectively and even sensuously, as against instilling a sense of mystified spectatorial distance,” 22 the changing image of Kilimanjaro in the age of a “tourism of doom” might activate in the reader an ecocritical attitude in the process of reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Such a reading must take John Dewey’s re-definition of traditional aesthetics into account. Dewey moved away from the notion of a substantialist aesthetics, stressing the aspect of the specific experience of an object or text. The attitude towards such an object constitutes its aesthetic quality. Reception aesthetics, with Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser as the most prominent trailblazers, focused on the various acts of reading in order to analyze the “discrepancies produced by the reader during the gestalt-forming process” (Iser 133). In this process, the reader becomes both observer and participant, because the representation of people and locations in literature is realized by a performative act in the mind of the reader. Winfried Fluck has recently transferred this reader-response model to imaginary spaces, and 20 A similar tendency was visible in Thoreau’s account of his life in the woods at Walden Pond where he regularly travelled back to Concord on the railroad tracks which passed along the south-west shore. 21 Buell addressed the issue of antithesis and symbiosis in theoretical terms in his article “Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis” published in this book. 22 See Buell’s article in this book (5). Tourism of Doom 205 asked to what extent space can become an aesthetic object. In order to gain cultural meaning in an ecocritical reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I follow Fluck’s assumption that “physical space has to become mental space or more precisely, imaginary space” (25). Conceptualizing the object as a carrier of an aesthetic function makes it possible, in my reading of “Kilimanjaro,” to transfer its implications to a new ecocritical context. I suggest a recontextualization of Hemingway’s concept of “whiteness” in the metaphysical Masai term “Ngàje Ngài” (House of God) in order to concentrate on its function in a changed discourse on African safaris and the trekking industry of Kilimanjaro. Hemingway’s short story about “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” may not be part of the subgenre of environmental non-fiction which problematizes the interactions between natural and built environment. Nevertheless, the citynature binary, which Buell identifies as the oldest and most deeply embedded metaphor to come to terms with the experience of urban life, assumes a new dimension by contrasting the immersive power of Hemingway’s fiction with a close up image of the glacier on, let’s say, Google Earth™. Thus, two contrasting representations of Kilimanjaro come into focus: the mental construction produced in the reader’s mind based on Hemingway’s narrative from 1936, and the mental construction created by recent satellite images which can be accessed worldwide via the Internet. Fictional forms of (spatial) representations, as Fluck reminds us, “bring an object into our world but they are never stable and identical with itself” (31). In the case of reading Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro,” the fictional representation is based on a performative mode. How does this apply to an ecocritical approach? The dramatic changes to the earth’s environment during the last century have caused the ice on Kilimanjaro to recede. Mountain climbers who hope to see, with Harry, the “great, height, and unbelievable white in the sun” might be disappointed due to the loss of the ice fields on Kilimanjaro, which has been reported since the second half of the 19 th century. Since the first tracking in 1912 until 2000, 82 percent of the icecap has been lost. Within only fifteen years, from 1984 until 1999, the glacier of Kilimanjaro lost about 300 meter of vertical ice (Stewart 101). Predictions say that by 2015, the snow may be completely gone. 23 In short, the striking symbol of quasi-religious purification and the sense of heavenly fulfillment, which Harry envisions in his mock flight approaching the “House of God,” hardly translates into a real world experience, which shows mankind diminishing its white purity. According to studies on the Kilimanjaro ice-fields conducted by Sheffield University in the 1950, industrialization is not the only cause for climate change. The blame also falls on uncontrolled exploitations of planetary resources, a general indifference towards the effects of global pollution, and a slummification of the world. The Complete Trekker’s Guide to Kilimanjaro 23 See The Ohio State University School of Earth Sciences. 2 Nov. 2008 <http: / / www. geology.ohio-state.edu/ news_detail.php? newsId=1> F RANK M EHRING 206 warns those who wish to see Kilimanjaro as Hemingway did - “‘great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun’” - need to hurry up (Stewart 104). These trekkers, world travellers and adventure seekers from Western civilizations feed the Kilimanjaro tourist industry, which, in turn, adds to the production of greenhouse gases and waste. 24 Their ever-increasing presence undermines the very dream of purity and cultural authenticity, which is at the heart of the climbing experience. As Hemingway shows us through Harry, tourists cannot shake off their (guilty) memories of their urban pasts. Like Harry, they embark upon safaris which merely stage the encounter with wildlife within a controlled and restrained organizational grid. The guides have established safe tours, comfortable camps, and ample food supplies replete with wine and whiskey. 25 Harry’s trackers took him through the bushes and after the shooting skinned and slew the animals. Hemingway used the image of the snows on tip of Kilimanjaro in order to evoke a kind of purity which reminded Theodore Roosevelt of familiar images of the mythical American West. At the foot of Kilimanjaro, Roosevelt observed that in “many ways it reminds one rather curiously of the great plains of the West, where they slope upward to the foot-hills of the Rockies” (30). Like nineteenth century paintings which recreated a pure landscape ready to receive the imprint of civilization on the frontier, Hemingway uses fiction to superimpose the nostalgic search for a new natural purity to the African setting. The corruption of this endeavor became apparent by the fakeness of a guided safari tour and the urban memories which dominate the transcultural encounters at the foot of Kilimanjaro. Today, Google Earth™ can take one on a virtual flight from the plains towards Kilimanjaro. The discrepancy between Harry’s illusion of flying towards the “snow” and the disturbing image of the receding glacier on the Internet bring into question the very reasons, which led the protagonist to Africa. 24 The local communities around the Kilimanjaro rely on the Hemingway tourist industry, which has taken advantage of the popularity of Hemingway’s works to create, for example, Leland’s A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris (1989) or to set up safari trips promoted via the internet under the name of Hemingway. In the appendix on “Bibliography and Further Reading” of Kilimanjaro: A Complete Trekker’s Guide, Stewart argues that among book publications Hemingway’s short story is among the most celebrated and famous accounts (250). To add to the superficial quality of the connection between authenticity and Hemingway’s writings on Kilimanjaro, the name of Hemingway is misspelled consistently throughout the book as “Hemmingway.” 25 A recent travel guide to Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, encourages its audience by announcing that “it is possible to reach the 5895m summit without any technical climbing ability” (Stewart back cover). Thus, it encourages would-be tourist mountaineers to engage in the fiction of an adventurous African encounter like the one Harry had hoped for. Tourism of Doom 207 Fig 2: Virtual flight to Kilimanjaro via Google Earth. Accessed Nov. 29, 2009. Image NASA, Image © 2009 TerraMetrics (2009) and © 2008 DigitalGlobe Conclusion In the story’s epigraph, Hemingway uses the vernacular term Ngàje Ngài for Mount Kilimanjaro and gives the meaning of the phrase (House of God), thus distinguishing between cultural insiders (who know) and outsiders (who need to be told). The cosmopolitan traveller Harry claims to love the foreign world he has come to, but he is in fact completely estranged from the location, the people, the language, the African plant and animal life, and what it means to live in such an environment. Paralyzed by his infected wound, Harry escapes to other places in a series of flashbacks that indicate that he has travelled, seen many exotic places, fought bravely in several wars, and met all kinds of people. His mind is filled with stories which promise a productive future for a long literary career. But none of this has anything to do with Africa or Kilimanjaro, to which he remains an outsider. My analysis of cultural indifference exemplified in the African encounters of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was not designed to revise the many readings that scholarship has produced. Nor was it my intention to counterbalance the reputation which Hemingway’s work has achieved during the last decades. By following Müller’s call to apply a Rortian reading to Hemingway’s literary oeuvre, I am interested in the moral and ecocritical potential that a story set at the foot of the Kilimanjaro in the mid-1930s can hold in the act of reading in the new Millennium. The combination of a Rortian reading with ecocritical studies shows that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” can engage the reader in questions of cultural (in)difference and consequences for the environment. F RANK M EHRING 208 The process of coming to understand that Harry has lived a lie and has deluded himself into thinking that he was an open-minded cosmopolitan, holds a potential to engage the reader in questions of ethical and ecocritical import. The imperatives derived from my reading reveal in Harry what Rorty described as sins of incuriosity and self-satisfaction. From this perspective, it becomes clear that behind the “tourism of doom” industry lurks a cultural and ecological incuriosity similar to the one that Harry brings to Kilimanjaro. A transcontinental adventure marked by tiredness of western civilization, with the emphasis on ready-made encounters of exotic terrains, is likely to be scarred by cultural indifference. My reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” liberates the text from the familiar accusation that it is Hemingway’s “problem” when he consistently refuses to acknowledge the emptiness of the mythic forms of wilderness his code heroes and the untamed land they allegedly inhabit. Instead, by combining an ethical and ecocritical approach, the reader is led to the address cultural indifference and the city-nature dichotomy as a problem in his very own time. With Cole Porter, Hemingway seems to tell us: You come to Africa, you come to play; You have a wonderful time, you go away. And, from then on, you talk of Kilimanjaro knowingly; You may know Kilimanjaro, you don’t know Ngàje Ngài. 26 26 This article is an abridged version of the article “Between Ngàje Ngài and Kilimanjaro: Transcultural Spaces in Hemingway’s African Encounters” that will be published in 2011 in Hemingway and America, edited by Miriam B. Mandel. 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Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 170-196. Slotkin, Richard. “Myth and the Production of History.” Ideology and Classic American Literature. Eds. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 70-90. Stewart, Alexander. Kilimanjaro: A Complete Trekker’s Guide. Milnthorpe, Cumbria: Cicerone P, 2004. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc., 1966. Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2002. RALPH J . POOLE Bastardized History: Elif Shafak’s Transcultural Poetics 1 Comic Survival or the Endless Repeat Melody [Asya] offered one of the headphones to Armanoush. Armanoush accepted the headphone warily and asked: “Which Johnny Cash song are we going to listen to? ” “‘Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog! ’” […] And the song started, first a listless prelude, then country melodies fusing with seagull shrieks and Turkish vocalizations in the background. […] There were a few tables scattered outside on the sidewalk. A grim couple settled themselves at one of them, and then another couple, with stressed-out, serious urban faces. Armanoush watched their gestures with curiosity, likening them to characters from a Fitzgerald novel. (Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul 200, 205) This urban scene taken from Elif Shafak’s novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) not only mixes dissonant sounds and clashing images, it also envisions a transnational encounter on several semantic levels: Asya, the Turkish girl and native Istanbulite, takes Armanoush, her American cousin of Turkish- Armenian descent, on a tourist tour accompanied by local city noises as well as American country songs, while her visitor compares this foreign urban setting of Istanbul to her own, yet fictionalized American background. It is a scene that while with “a touch of enchantment” above all offers a disturbing and dangerous vision “full of contradictions and temper, utterly disharmonious […] and ready to explode at any time” (200). This hypersensitive urban locale, focalized through the young female visitor’s stunned gaze, alludes to interpersonal and transnational intersections crisscrossing familial, cultural, and ethnic histories. Even though employing the standard trope of a tourist’s first-encounter perspective, Shafak evokes an Istanbul not so much as the mythologized city located on two continents joining Europe and Asia, but as a chaotic, puzzling, and multifarious “hodgepodge of ten million lives. It is an open book of ten million scrambled stories” (243). Istanbul thus figures both as distinctly Turkish cultural focal point and as a global city that shows resemblances to multi-million cities across the world and history, especially including US-American metropolitan sites. It was Leo Marx, who in his effort to un-puzzle (anti-)urbanism in classic American literature, sharply distinguishes American from European cities. Tying together the unlikely couple of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Marx shows that while often negative images like the scaffold or the valley of ashes represent facets of the dominant culture of R ALPH J. P OOLE 214 industrial capitalism, there are also abundant moments of alternative “pastoral” visions not so much of resistance, but of simple withdrawal into nature and thus into the realm of the “pre-socialized resources of the self” (78). This notion of reclusive and idyllic life prior to social and political turmoil stands, of course, in stark contrast to the actual development of American cities. “Most American cities, after all, have been built since the onset of industrialization,” claims Marx and “unlike London, Paris, or Rome” - and I want to include Istanbul in this list here - they embody relatively few features of any social order other than that of industrial capitalism. If the American city is perceived chiefly as the locus of a particular socio-economic order, that view accords with the historical fact that millions of Americans have moved to cities, not because they preferred urban life to rural life, but rather because of the inescapable coercion of a market economy. (Marx 78) Nevertheless, writers like Shafak expand this intra-American dichotomous perspective to encompass a transcultural scope of lived metropolitan experience both in the New and Old World. Shafak accordingly writes against an “etherialization” of history that Lewis Mumford discusses in his study on The City in History as counterpoint to the materiality of the city. Instead of the notion that cities have taken part in “etherializing” history, Mumford argues for an oscillation between the ethereal and material, between the symbolic and the concrete: The rhythm of life in cities seems to be an alternation between materialization and etherialization: the concrete structure, detaching itself through a human response, takes on a symbolic meaning, uniting the knower and the known; while subjective images, ideas, intuitions […] likewise take on material attributes. (113) Ihab Hassan takes up this idea of a city design being linked to a social process of materialization and points towards the abstract, theoretical, and hidden ‘nature’ of cities, for the city, he says, “acts as mediator between the human and natural orders, as a changing network of social relations, as a flux of production and consumption, […] as an arena of violence, play, desire, as a labyrinth of solitudes, as a system of covert controls, semiotic exchanges” (95). Hassan’s effort is to reveal “the city as a fiction composing many fictions” (97) and thus to claim a complicity between fiction and the city that against all experiences of disaster, terror, and destruction remains a visionary space for writers: “We stand as ever between history and hope. And standing there I perceive the postmodern city as a place of ecumenism” (108). Shafak’s metropolitan novels envision such ecumenical spaces in a more literal sense than Hassan may have had in mind. In her earlier novel The Saint of Insipient Insanities, she brings together three male roommates from three different countries, all students in Boston between 2002 and 2003. Abed, the devout Moslem from Morocco, engaged to marry a girl back home in an arranged marriage and watching slasher films at night to soothe his multitudinous worries, and Piyu, the devout Catholic from Spain, very much in love with the bulimic Mexican-American girl Allegra, are joined by Ömer, the Bastardized History 215 Turk, who is not so religiously inclined, sexually very agile, but falling in love with Gail, a half-Jewish, half-Protestant lesbian, feminist, and vegan chocolate maker, who is also very much prone to suicidal tendencies. All three students in different ways pursue romantic longings, none of them succeeding very well. It becomes obvious that their struggle for survival within an often hostile American environment brings them closer together, even though they vastly differ in their respective cultural and personal backgrounds. But all agree, for example, on their love for food, a topic that in The Bastard of Istanbul is explored in even greater detail and depth, where the ‘surprising’ similarities between traditional, yet transculturally available Armenian and Turkish cuisines are starkly contrasted against a globalized McDonald-fast food culture devoid of long-standing local practices. The three unlikely roommates of The Saint of Insipient Insanities judge their lives in exile in terms of balancing the gains and losses, be it through engaging in food, alcohol, education, relationships, or religion. It is, however, above all the intercultural relationships between Ömer and Gail as well as Piyu and Allegra (and Abed’s significant lack thereof) that the novel represents as intersecting and mirroring instances of transcultural negotiations leading up to an uncanny climax in the end: Gail kills herself during their honeymoon in Istanbul by jumping off the bridge crossing the Bosporus. What is at stake here is, in particular, the issue of time, sequence, and development. As much as the novel’s narrative structure denies any logically motivated linearity of plot, with the first chapter taking place rather towards the end - but not quite the end - of the plot, the many chapters mostly taking a specific character into focus add up to a scattered mosaic of ironically comic survival situations in an alien location. The importance and vagaries of time are especially articulated through the voice and actions of Ömer. As primary embodiment of Shafak’s displaced migrant, the “stranger in a strangeland” as she herself claims in an interview (“Migrations” 57), his measurement and thus perception of time relies not on the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and days, but on an individualized pattern of recurrence instead: Ömer Özsipahio ğ lu was, in every single layer down to the lowest echelons of his soul, demoralized and unsettled, poo-scared and exhausted into slow motion by the hyperspeed of that crepuscular hologram called “time.” Anyhow, what was time? […] it wasn’t the definition, and not even time per se that got on his nerves, but what she was supposed to be doing all the time: flow . . . and flow . . . and flow . . . It was precisely this flowing part, and flowing not as in lyrical meandering but as in galloping at full speed, that made him so tense about it. (The Saint 75) Having the feeling that time always needed to be compartmentalized, analyzed, and measured, “and yet never accumulating into a meaningful whole” (The Saint 75), made him come to a conclusion how to handle this puzzling phenomenon ‘time.’ Instead of giving in to the purposeful linearity of time as measured through clocks and watches, he chooses to rely on the time’s circu- R ALPH J. P OOLE 216 lar quality measured through yet a very different media: the endless loop of music. Rather than hours, minutes, and seconds, he used albums, songs and beats. The length of a period between two succeeding things was tantamount to the length of a certain song played over and over again. Basically, it was good to be reminded that unlike time, music could always be rewound, paused, and replayed. […] It did not glue itself to the one-way current of time heading toward a phony notion of progress. The circular loop of songs eased the burden of the irreversibility of linear time. (The Saint 76-77) As much as Ömer’s habit of measuring time seems to be a product of his exile existence, it actually predates his arrival in Boston and is thus a cultural ‘baggage’ that he brings along from Turkey. Is it, however, a distinctly personal habit, or rather a cultural distinction pointing towards an East/ Westdichotomy? Since Ömer’s songs, and overall they are Western, are comments on his current situation, the first conclusion seems quite obvious. Here Ömer could be said to be one of those “personal-stereo users,” who according to sound researcher Michael Bull manage time as part of everyday life through the use of technological devices such as the walkman or “personal stereo” as he calls it: The ritualized journey and the pressing demands of the everyday come with a recognition that the cyclical and linear components of the day constitute either a threat or an unacceptable incursion to their everyday life. Users’ experiences are rather understood in terms of their desire to operationalize a ‘compensatory metaphysics’ in which time is transformed and experience heightened through its technologically mediated management. (161) Ömer’s effort to control and manage his everyday life and thus to keep civilizational fears and threats at bay indeed participates in such “technologically mediated” strategies of urban “lifeworld” partitioning that Bull describes. Taking a side-glance at one of Elif Shafak’s essays, however, leads more in the direction of the second conclusion of alluding to a culturally distinct and historically specific context. In this essay called “Transgender Bolero,” she alludes to yet another “circular loop” that is significant in this context since it attests to Turkey’s enforced Western transformation in the early twentieth century. Shafak first reflects about her first novel on the hermaphrodite Sufi mystic. Its title Pinhan refers to a mystical term meaning “covertness,” and she claims to have followed “in the footsteps of a certain tradition of disclosure - the way of telling things without saying them, disclosing without exposing, speaking through silences, just like the Sufis used to do in the past. When the society is not ready to hear what you have to say, advised the Sufi, say it to no one other than your soul and your soulmates” (“Transgender Bolero” 27). Within the essay, Shafak then frames this poetological statement with the encounter of a transsexual that she watches on a ferryboat crossing the Bosporus. This encounter is strikingly “bizarre” due to its transgender implications with the Bastardized History 217 transsexual making visible in broad daylight what usually remains hidden within Istanbulite nightly dark corners. But it is her specific action of putting on a walkman and listening with increased volume to Ravel’s “Bolero” that brings Shafak into her very own cultural loop of time: As she leaned back listening to the world’s longest crescendo, for a fleeting moment the world’s sexiest smile crossed her lips. All of a sudden, past and present, she and I, the silences within my novel and her clamorous existence on earth got connected to one another, as if everything had fallen neatly in this place, each and every one of us transforming into personal scraps of repetitions along the protracted and yet equally abrupt social transformation that the Turkish state and society has undergone. (“Transgender Bolero” 27) Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” of 1928, a “piece lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of one long, unbroken crescendo” (Ravel, qt. in Shafak 27), nevertheless was structured as a seeming repetition of a single melody (actually two alternating melodies), culminating in a tremendous climax that many took to resemble a sexual orgasm. As Shafak asserts, along with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the fabrication of the Turkish Republic as a modern and secular nation-state came the attempt in discouraging the practice of traditional Anatolian folk music and the encouragement to rather listen to Western music. As one of the controlled incentives, Ravel’s “Bolero” was played on the public ferryboats travelling along the Bosporus in an endless loop. Not only does this radically disregard the composers musical intentions, turning the climactic experience in its ironic opposite with the repetitive melodic structure now meaning nothing but boring, annoying repetition instead of the ultimate and ecstatic crescendo. This practice also attests to the official cutting-off of local traditions in favor of Westernized modernization, whereas unofficially these very traditions have continued till today. Shafak here claims that “perhaps it can be plausibly argued that the story of state, sexuality and modernization in Turkey resembles a song in a repeat track mode, or else, a melody full of repetitions” (“Transgender Bolero” 28). Like the transsexual listening to the “Bolero,” in yet another cross-cultural appropriation Asya’s habit in The Bastard of Istanbul to constantly - endlessly one might say - listen to Johnny Cash’s aggressive-mournful tunes paradoxically reflects Asya’s own dissociate mental state (“Asya had decided she too was born in the soul of misery” [The Bastard 63]) as well as the city’s explosive influence on its inhabitants. But I believe that especially Ömer’s habit of measuring time in endless repetition rather than progressive linearity demonstrates Shafak’s idea of a “deluge of perpetual repetition alongside underlying transformation, a long, drawn-out melody of modernization” (“Transgender Bolero” 47) that characterizes Turkey’s difficult stance as intermediary between East and West. This novel’s ending with newly-wed American Gail jumping the Turkish bridge and exiled, visiting-home Ömer once again listening - repeat track - to one of his American songs, ironically, but in its prolepsis appropriately titled “Gimme Danger” (by punk rocker R ALPH J. P OOLE 218 Iggy Pop, although not mentioned in the text) turns the endless repetition into a drastic and highly explosive full stop: Gail’s death. 2 Elegiac Metropolis or “A Bridge in Between” The novel’s tangled mosaic plot builds up to an astounding climax. The last pages can truly be called a crescendo as well as accelerando in musical terms. This stretto connects and interweaves all the novel’s motifs. While the first chapter with Ömer’s bemoaning his difficult lot as a forlorn foreigner and desperate husband embarked on the topic of cultural misunderstandings due to migratory processes, the overlapping synchronicity of the novel’s ending points towards a contrary direction: no matter where you are or whom you are with, a feeling of belonging, sharing, and intimacy is fluctuating and temporary at best. The three roommates all embark on revelatory intimate experiences at the exact same time, two of them in Boston and Ömer in Istanbul. And while Piyu finds out about Allegra’s secret bulimia and Abed finally gives in to his sexual needs, Ömer must face Gail’s suicide. The novel of immigration that starts out as a cultural critique of America’s global imperialism filtered through Ömer’s (but not only his) sense of loss of identity ends with a huge step towards the claim of cultural relativism: individual estrangement and suffering supersedes collective or national dilemmas. Ömer, while listening - repeat track - to “Gimme Danger,” once again has the feeling of “lagging behind the speed of time, unable to catch the cadence of life, except that this time it is the cadence of death he is running after” (349). As much as “the cadence of life” seems like an oxymoron, since in musical terms it comprises a harmonized ending and thus “cadence of life” metaphorically would come to signify life’s opposite, namely death, Ömer’s feeling of “lagging behind the speed of time” actually equals that musical motion of ritardando with which a piece slows down towards its finale. On the one hand, therefore, Ömer’s habit of listening repeat track can be seen as a defiance of an untimely ending, on the other hand his wish to be in accord with the “cadence of life” can be read as the equivalent to a latent death wish or as “incipient insanity” in allusion to the novel’s enigmatic title. In any case, this incongruity there and then coalesces to make perfect, if tragic sense. Belatedly running after Gail, he has one last - and fatally false - consolation: “She won’t die. No, she’ll not. People do not commit suicide on other people’s soil, and this is not her homeland” (350). Departing from Ömer’s fallacious belief in survival and in a sudden shift of focalization, the omniscient narrator takes over and brings the reader to acknowledge the transcultural tragedy within repeatedly failed comic survival efforts: “But did she ever have one [i.e. homeland]? Who is the real stranger - the one who lives in a foreign land and knows he belongs elsewhere or the one who lives the life of a foreigner in her native land and has no place else to belong? ” (350-351) Thus, while Ömer until the end remains stuck in his lack of understanding Bastardized History 219 the complexity of cultural crosscurrents, the reader may capture the tragic sense of such dissonant chords. Ultimately, the novel ends in a bleak juxtaposition of untimely time sequences: The bridge is sixty-four meters above sea level. A song plays on Ömer’s Walkman. The song lasts three minutes, twenty seconds, but if you keep repeating the track it can last an eternity. Gail’s fall lasts only 2.7 seconds." (351) Everlasting suspension (the illusion of eternal life) and sudden closure (the reality of imminent death) meet producing an explosively discordant finale instead of an elaborately expanded harmonious cadence. Shafak here recalls Georg Simmel’s idea of the separateness and connectedness that meet in the bridge, since walking on the bridge, “before we have become inured to it through daily habit, […] must have provided the wonderful feeling of floating for a moment between heaven and earth” (“Bridge and Door” 173). Shafak refrains from glossing over the eccentric vagaries of the lives of her transculturally migrating characters, highlighting instead the eccentricities of their idiosyncratic choices. This last chapter, appropriately called “A Bridge in Between” draws on a transnational poetics that on the one hand ‘bridges’ cultures, but on the other hand leaves people homeless for no “apparent reason” as Gail’s suicide symbolizes: “Once again in her life, she started watching herself falling down, and the falling down accelerate at a bewildering pace, eroding her desire to live bit by bit, like blood oozing from a wound inside, except that there was no apparent wound, and, therefore, no apparent reason why.” Apparent being the key word here. In a diary entry of 1925, Virginia Woolf asks herself whether a novel could be an elegy: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new - by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy? ” (qtd. in Kennedy 1). In a sense, I believe Shafak’s novel to be such an elegy, here on an idealized vision of transculturation within a global sphere. Even though the novel is set directly following the fatal 9/ 11 incidents and features Muslim characters, it makes no particular references to any specific cultural war being waged against Islamic immigrants in the US. Her elegiac approach is not so much political here than personal: it is the intimacy between people that has been corrupted and lost in this time and age. This links her to urban theorists who claim that the modern Western city has become a “world of strangers” with a logic of sexuality of its own that depends upon the “large, dense and permanent cluster of heterogeneous human beings in circulation” (Bech, qtd. in Knopp 151). Shafak’s notion, however, includes Istanbul and thus a metropolis located between West and East in her depiction of the idiosyncrasies of exiled identities. Even though her characters are not so much forced into exile, their migrating across the globe as well as their stubbornly remaining at an allotted spot is a sign of their internal state of exile. And consequently, not only are evolving intimate relations prone to be transitory at best, fatal at worst; inti- R ALPH J. P OOLE 220 macy as such seems to be bound to the fundamental dread of loss - personally and culturally. As Abed, the Moroccan who steadfastly believed in the truth of his love only to be betrayed by his far-away beloved Safiya, ruminates when in the end he negates all that he has believed so far and gives in to a fleeting moment of anonymous intimacy with an older woman at the laundromat. Feeling “as if pulled by an invisible rope,” he comes to realize that he has deserted Safiya long before she has: He sensed but could never explain to anyone, no less to himself, that his loyalty for Safiya had been abstrusely interwoven with his devotion not only to their common past, but also to their country. The effect of losing bit by bit his connection to Safiya was a subtle loosening of the moorings that tied him to his homeland. Not that he felt less connected to Morocco now. But he somehow felt more connected to his life in the United States. (The Saint 348) Shafak’s metropolitan elegy is not one that bemoans nostalgic notions of ‘homeland,’ but that calls forth a sense of loss and suffering as a world-wide ailment, beyond national borders. The synchronicity at the end of her tale of two cities stages the coincidental acts of Gayle’s suicide, Allegra’s ferocious eating binge, and Abed’s sexual hysteria as temporally, but not logically interconnected. And while on the one hand, Shafak calls upon Istanbul’s bridge as literally connecting the two halves of the city, but above all symbolically connecting West and East, the synchronic actions of those various individuals in different parts of the world on the other hand create cross-cultural lineages way beyond geopolitical log(ist)ics. Shafak in this joins critics like Leslie Adelson, who in writing on the trope of “betweenness” in relation to Turkey’s location on the cultural map of our time forcefully argues “against between” claiming that this “discursive model that repeatedly situates Turks and other migrants ‘between two world’ relies too schematically and too rigidly on territorial concepts of ‘home’ (Heimat)” (23). Accordingly, we need to read Shafak’s effort in balancing the gains and losses of transnational migrants not as a nostalgic yearning for the “tired bridge ‘between two worlds,’” but as beckoning of transitional spaces, an invitation to cross transnational thresholds as sites “where consciousness of something new flashes into view” (Adelson 24). Here the image of the door supersedes that of the bridge, because “the door represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act. […] Thus the door becomes the image of the boundary point at which human beings actually always stand or can stand” (Simmel, “Bridge and Door” 172). The Saint of Insipient Insanities is Elif Shafak’s first novel written in English. Before making this linguistic move towards the lingua franca of world languages, she already has been, as an extensive, thirty-page interview in the American academic journal Meridians of 2003 announced, “an accomplished and award-winning novelist in her home country of Turkey” (Shafak, “Migrations” 55). Although Meridians introduces Shafak to the American audience as somewhat of a surprise novelist, she proves to have actually been a Bastardized History 221 successful and versatile writer for some time with novels dealing with hermaphrodite mystics (Pinhan [The Sufi], 1997), estranged and deterritorialized Sephardic Jews ( Ş ehrin Aynaları [The Mirrors of the City], 1999), traumatized obese women (Mahrem [The Gaze], 2000), and degraded apartment buildings (Bit Palas [The Flea Palace], 2002). All of these novels in one way or another focus on Turkish nationality, history, and sexuality, mostly highlighting the cultural history of Istanbul, which might account for the lack of interest in her novels outside of Turkey. With her fifth novel of 2004, The Saint of Insipient Insanities, however, Elif Shafak has entered a different plane, namely that of transnational literature, since not only this novel originally is written in English, it also is set mainly in east-coast metropolitan North America. She has continued writing in English with her highly disputed sixth novel of 2007, The Bastard of Istanbul, which with its predominantly urban setting of Istanbul but also of Tucson, Arizona, and San Francisco could be said to be a counter piece to The Saint in its Turkish-American connection. In both of her English-language novels, Shafak deals with the questioning of ethnicity and nationality from postcolonial and global perspectives, and thus on the one hand departing from her narrower focus on Turkish cultural history of her earlier novels, but on the other hand suggesting to read post-Ottoman Turkey’s national setting against the backdrop of postcolonial national histories across the world. To be sure, the Turkish republic of today cannot easily be integrated within a postcolonial discourse, but a set of developments makes this feasible, after all. For once, as Ismael Talib in his study on the language of postcolonial literatures asserts, the association of the introduction of writing with the colonial power may open up the discussion in the case of Turkey “which was not colonized by a Western European power, but which also introduced the romanized script for the writing of Turkish, because of the belief that it was more efficient for writing the language” (72). This already shows the influence of the West on the shaping of the Turkish nation-state, a process that Shafak likens to disenchantment: “The Turkish language has been cleansed, Turkified - the reformists got rid of Persian words, Arabic words, Sufi expressions. The language has been disenchanted. […] When you try to limit language, you limit your own imagination” (“Crossover Artists” 25-26). Deniz Kandiyoti and Ay ş e Saktanber further claim in their introduction to Fragments of Culture, even in countries such as Ottoman Turkey “that did not experience direct colonial rule, European hegemony and the perceived ‘backwardness’ of their [] societies created a terrain for ideological contest in which notions of ‘catching up,’ imitation of the West, cultural corruption and authenticity continued to have a purchase on political discourse” (3). Instead of relying on the traditional East/ West binaries, postcolonial scholarship especially in the aftermath of Edward Said’s Orientalism has successfully dismantled such cultural clichés pointing toward “the processes of cultural hybridization that characterize alternative modernities” (Kandioyti and Saktanber 3) such as Turkey’s. And above all, literature has taken on a pivotal R ALPH J. P OOLE 222 role to reflect these cultural transitions as Shafak herself claims: “In Turkey, the novel especially served this end because it was a new genre. It was the voice of Westernization when the Turkish reformers were trying to accelerate the process of Westernization” (“Crossover Artists” 24). Shafak on various levels has taken up the lastingly problematic centerperiphery model of power to disclose how Western perceptions of Turkey, but also Turkish self-perceptions at times easily position Turkey within the culturally less privileged peripheral location. Ömer’s awareness of how Americans might perceive him is mirrored by Asya’s self-deprecatory statements that she articulates in her “Personal Manifesto of Nihilism: ” Back in Turkey, he used be ÖMER ÖZS İ PAH İ O Ĝ LU. Here in America, he had become an OMAR OZSIPAHIOGLU. His dots were excluded for him to be better included. After all, Americans, just like everyone else, relished familiarity - in names they could pronounce, sounds they could resonate, even if they didn’t make much sense one way or another. Yet, few nations could perhaps be as self-assured as the Americans in reprocessing the names and surnames of foreigners. (The Saint 5) Asya Kazancı was still lying in bed under a goose-feather quilt, listening to the myriad sounds only Istanbul is capable of producing while her mind meticulously composed a Personal Manifesto of Nihilism: Article One: If you cannot find a reason to love the life you are living, do not pretend to love the life you are living. (The Bastard 121) But besides letting her characters take on opposing cultural standpoints, Shafak herself is keenly aware of her own cultural position as Turkish author aspiring to ‘conquer’ the American literary market including the linguistic adaptation of her own name from Turkish “ Ş afak” to Americanized “Shafak.” Additionally, she is forced to think of herself as an ethnicized woman, because in the US she is being perceived as “colored” due to her cultural background. While most Turks would consider themselves as “white” or “Caucasian,” she refers to this dubious category of “skin color” within the context of “deterritorialization, non-belonging, and the constant feeling of being an ‘outsider,’ in addition to outside perceptions of what it means to be from an Islamic country, Muslim or Turkish, even though I am not a practitioner of Islamic religions, that makes me a ‘woman of color’” (“Migrations” 61). In this awareness of cultural double-standards, Shafak’s transnational poetics and above all ethics become apparent as a field of experimentation that reconsiders established cultural premises and literary canons. She therefore projects and delineates, as Jahan Ramazani suggests, “models of transnational imaginative citizenship that are mobile, ambivalent, and multifaceted” (354). In this sense, Shafak’s poetics of transnationalism can help us both understand and imagine a world in which cultural boundaries are fluid, transient, and permeable, and thus read ourselves as imaginative citizens not of one or another hermetically sealed national or civilizational block, but of intercultural worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge. (Ramazani 355) Bastardized History 223 In her English language novels, Shafak participates in that shift towards opening up the fixed boundaries of a nationalist literature to embrace a transnational poetics of overlapping, intersecting, and converging qualities, which here also includes envisioning herself as a “woman of color” for strategic reasons. As Diana Fuss succinctly reminds us there are times and places, where “strategic essentialism” can be employed as powerful tool to dismantle fixed either/ or constructions, if one keeps in mind that there is difference between “deploying” or “activating” essentialism and “falling into” or “lapsing into” essentialism: “Falling into” or “lapsing into” implies that essentialism is inherently reactionary - inevitably and inescapably a problem or a mistake. “Deploying” or “activating,” on the other hand, implies that essentialism may have some strategic or interventionary value. (20) Shafak in this sense politically invests her marginal position as a female writer from a Muslim country to address issues relevant not only for her own ‘homeland,’ but for her targeted American audience as well. She uses the “soft-power” of literature to recall Turkey’s historical investment of such power as means of cultural homogenizing “to promote the establishment of a nation-state and the Turkification of language,” and calls for a strategic use of such power once again, but to different, namely transnationally oriented ends. Remembering the multicultural Ottoman past, she makes strategic use of the relinquished and forgotten merits of a Turkish heritage without falling back to a proto-colonial attitude of dominance and hierarchy: “Now, it is time to use soft power in the opposite direction. This time, through words and stories, newspapers and novels, we Turkish writers can uphold the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity that was dismantled but never completely lost” (Shafak, “Accelerating the Flow of Time” 26). She therefore imagines through her novels the particularities and histories of a nation-state like Turkey as well as the globalized phenomenon of world travelling and urban migration, and she excels, I think, especially when being most ironic. Humor is a trait that Shafak especially values in the English language, because of its possibility of relinquishing the “either/ or framework,” whereas Turkish humor for her is direct, “political humor, but not irony. […] In English, I found more gates for that humor, additional doors” (“Crossover Artists” 26). And so, instead of peacefully affirming or adamantly renouncing the metaphor of the “tired bridge ‘between two worlds,’” she lets an angry, young girl like Asya sardonically smirk at such an overwrought allusion when her aunt suggests acting as translator for her American visitor Armanoush: “Therefore, dear, you will be her translator. You will ferry her words to us and our words to her. […] Like a bridge extending over cultures, you will connect the East and the West.” R ALPH J. P OOLE 224 Asya crinkled her nose, as if she had just detected an awful stink in the house that was apparent only to her, and screwed up her lips, as if to say, “You wish! ” (The Bastard 134) 3 Edible City, or, the Etho-Poetics of Food and Sex Much like the tragic-comically overlapping synchronicity that characterized the climax of The Saint of Insipient Insanities and was acted out on the Bosporus Bridge as well as in Boston’s urban center, Shafak’s later novel The Bastard of Istanbul reinforces the notion of the idiosyncrasies of exiled identities. Here, the sole male heir of an old Istanbulite family hides in Tucson, Arizona, only to return to Istanbul after twenty years to face his past trauma and follow the fate of every single male in the family, i.e. a sudden early death: Like an evil spell put on the whole lineage, generations after generations of Kazancı men had died young and unexpectedly. […] Yet it was one thing to move away from the city where he was born, and another to be so far removed from his own flesh and blood. Mustafa Kazancı did not so much mind taking refuge in America forever as if he had no native soil to return to, or even living life always forward with no memories to recall, but to turn into a foreigner with no ancestors, a man with no boyhood, troubled him. (The Bastard 29, 285) Returning to Istanbul to recapture his run-away stepdaughter Armanoush, he has to face his “cultivated denial,” fully aware that “if he stayed here any longer, he would start to remember” (335). Mustafa has manufactured amnesia for good reasons: his flight to America years ago was brought on as aftermath of raping his sister and in turn fathering Asya unbeknownst to everyone else in the family. His involuntary return home not only brings him back to a household of women of three generations he had escaped from, but to a trip down memory lane: “The moment he had stepped into his childhood home, the spell that had shielded him all these years against his own memory had been shattered” (335). Through Mustafa’s guilt, shame, and denial that in turn caused Asya’s mother’s (his sister’s) hard-edged, cynical behavior as the family’s “black sheep” (174), Asya herself lacks a stable sense of identity and home. She is the victim of a family secret that not only socially stigmatizes her as “bastard,” but psychologically forces a dark past upon her own young life. And while she wishes to “have no past,” to be “a nobody” with “[n]o family, no memories and all that shit” (148), she is painfully aware of her status as “outcast in that house, eternally exiled from dreadful family secrets. In the name of protecting me, they have separated me from them” (175). Calling her own mother “aunt” and having no father that she knows of, her familial identity is suspended in a space of non-being, a last “bastard” in a long chain of fatefully forsaken ancestors, which due to historical and political circumstances has continuously been disrupted leaving its members scattered all over the world. Bastardized History 225 While metropolis, translated from the Greek, literally means mother-city and thus etymologically links the urban space to motherhood, Shafak makes it very clear that whatever haven these large mega-cities may offer, they have certainly lost their quality of a safe motherly home. In her novel, she delicately interweaves the story of two very different and culturally very distinct Ottoman families: one Armenian and diasporic, living in San Francisco, and the other Turkish and remaining in Istanbul. And yet, as the novel’s ending suggests, these families’ histories have connecting points both in the distant past and the immediate present as do many others: “Family stories intermingle in such ways that what happened generations ago can have an impact on seemingly irrelevant developments of the present day. The past is anything but bygone” (The Bastard 356). Through the lens of mostly female characters of multiple generations, the novel recounts the interconnected fate of these women and links them to a common history that was cut off through the demise of the Ottoman Empire in general and the injustices committed against Ottoman Armenians in 1915 in particular. Several passages clearly stake out this volatile political terrain, for example when Armanoush refers to herself as part of “a diaspora people” (178) being “the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk name Mustafa! ” (53-54). While ironically, Armanoush and her step-father have common ancestors and therefore, Mustafa actually is part of several relatives of Armanoush’s that she believes to lack, Asya’s mother has a lover who is also Armenian, but who does not want to be assigned to a diasporic fate claiming instead a multicultural and -ethnic urban heritage as his own: This city is my city. I was born and raised in Istanbul. My family’s history in this city goes back at least five hundred years. Armenian Istanbulites belong to Istanbul, just like the Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, and Jewish Istanbulites do. We have first managed and then badly failed to live together. We cannot fail again. (The Bastard 254) This Armenian’s account refers to the radical urban changes that affected Istanbul’s ethnic, non-Muslim inhabitants during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, drastically decimating the Christian population who made up a large part of the Istanbul’s intelligentsia, a fact Shafak mentions several times in her novel: “Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian millet to be eliminated by the late Ottoman government” (The Bastard 96). Sociologist Ça ğ lar Keyder also asserts: “Between 1915 and 1925, a total of more than two million Armenians and Greeks were killed, expelled, exchanged, or departed of their own will. This Christian population had constituted a disproportionate portion of the wealthier urban dwellers of the late empire” (145). Shafak, who in the historical Armenian Conference on the events of 1915, which after being postponed due to nationalist political pressure but was finally held in September 2005 in R ALPH J. P OOLE 226 Istanbul, presented a paper on the only female Armenian intellectual Zabel Esayan, stresses the importance that against a “nationalist smear campaign” a growing “network of intellectual solidarity between Turkish and Armenian intellectuals” has joined forces in collective efforts to improve Turkey’s human-rights record. She herself quotes from Marc Nichanian’s Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (2002), a quote that might as well stand for her own effort in The Bastard of Istanbul: The years will pass, the political enmities and hatred will fall into oblivion, the new humanity, beguiled with new hopes and new desires, will forget today’s mourning and misery, but one thing will remain, which cannot be healed or forgotten, that is the protracted agony of a whole people under torture, of which you will find but a pale image in the following pages. (Nichanian, qtd. in Shafak, “Accelerating the Flow of Time” 25) For this effort, Shafak was put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness” under the Turkish Penal Code, because some of the Armenian characters spoke of the “Armenian genocide” in the novel. Even though the charges were dropped (after PEN International organized a campaign of appeals on her behalf) ruling that she could not be prosecuted for something said by a fictional character, the novel does hit a sore spot. As much as the novel’s title refers to the youngest daughter of the Istanbulite family literally being a ‘bastard,’ the overall concern of the novel hints at a larger meaning of the term ‘bastard.’ The mysterious death premise of all male family members leaves this particular family not only without a proper patriarch, it also makes perfectly clear that it is the weakness and failure of the fathers as leading figures that has led to this state of cultural, ethnic and historical bastardization, the anomaly of rupturing a wholesome multiethnic society, breaking its structure and dispelling its units. Shafak brutally dismisses the last male descendant through murder. And it is food that plays the crucial role in both executing the murder and reuniting all others. The novel abounds in food and food metaphors. All chapters are titled with food names from “Cinnamon” to “White Rice,” and some include elaborate recipes. In one particularly striking scene, Armanoush experiences her step-father’s Turkish family as they wish to excel in their famous Turkish hospitality only to be taken aback and then rejoicing in the fact that this girl knows all those meals and their names, because they remained the same in Turkish and Armenian cuisines. It is here that Shafak makes a strong argument in favor of cultural understanding across historical divides, namely that food as cultural phenomenon mirrors and transcends cultural processes at large. Especially when looking at diasporic situations, the editors of Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food argue that “cooking performs memory: food and recipes are links to cultural ‘roots’ and are, at the same time, testifying on the contact zones and ‘routes’ which their producers and consumers have gone through” (Döring, Heide, and Mühleisen 7). This certainly attests to the effort of Armanoush’s diasporic Armenian family in San Bastardized History 227 Francisco to uphold the culinary tradition of Armenian cooking at every family gathering. As Armanoush’s uncle remarks on one such occasion: Dikran Stamboulian gazed longingly at the food set out on the table, and reached for a jar of yogurt drink, Americanized with too many ice cubes. In multihued clay bowls of different sizes were many of his favorite dishes: fassoulye pilaki, kadın budu köfte, karnıyarık, newly made churek, and to Uncle Dikran’s delight bastırma. […] his heart warmed at the sight of bastırma and entirely melted when he saw his favorite dish next to it: burma. (The Bastard 51) This heart-warming and communal culinary experience - even when ‘watered down’ as partially Americanized - links its exiled participants to their lost home. It also captures the diasporic community’s struggle to maintain what Roger Bromley has termed “a critically imagined collective community” (9), critically here in the sense, as Peter Brooker explains, that although the diasporic experience “can invite nostalgia for an ‘authentic’ homeland,” as a critical concept it is reflexive and politicized, “always in a dialogic relation with the dominant and with the past, drawing upon both for its critical resources in the present” (20-21). Armanoush’s Armenian family takes part in this retelling and reworking of a collective historical sense, and especially Armanoush herself is not only a cultural hybrid, but also takes on the role of transcultural mediator literally migrating across the globe and thus opening up spatio-temporal possibilities of reimagining a “hetero-cultural present” (Brooker 23) where much may seem unassimilable at first. However, stretching the argument beyond the diasporic, Elspeth Probyn in her study on Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities goes on to claim that “eating reconfigures us in local, global and sexual ways” (145). It is through food and eating that love and shame, virtue and vice, passion and poison may all be mixed up together. This claim of an “etho-poetics” of food and sex (75) is not as far-fetched as it might seem, even within the diaspora. It is certainly not meant in a way that one may supersede the other: food instead of sex or vice versa. Rather, this is a claim to combine cultures and histories of our lives, “the pasts and present within which we live” (Probyn 146). And it is food and eating that “can foreground the sense and sensuality of the timing and touch of precise combinations” (Probyn 146) As Probyn remarks: “The imperative to bring together different elements, and at the same time to not lose sight of their individual flavors, textures, and inherent possibilities, extends across a wide range of sites” (146). It was Georg Simmel who made two famous, seemingly contradictory statements: eating and drinking “is the most egotistical thing, indeed the one most absolutely and immediately confined to the individual” (“Sociology of the Meal” 130). But this strict individuality of the eating act may be overcome in the temporal and special experience of community: “The shared nature of the meal, however, brings about temporal regularity, for only at a predetermined time can a circle of people assemble together - the first triumph over the naturalism of eating” (131). R ALPH J. P OOLE 228 This captures the turning of the natural into the social, the elemental into the alimentary. Shafak’s novel indeed revels in the celebration of the culinary community. It is at the table where the daughters - one Turkish, one Armenian-American - unite in a feast of making up bastardized histories. But food is also the site, and maybe Simmel here was right after all, where one eats utterly alone, when passion and poison clash fatally. The last chapter is entitled “Potassium Cyanide” and it refers to the poisonous ingredient, tasting like almonds, which is mixed up in the dessert of Mustafa, the family’s last male heir. He eats it, fully knowing, and also fully aware of his shame, namely of raping his sister and fathering a bastard. This most private incident, however, is encompassed by a collectivized and naturalized metropolis, that is aligned with the etho-poetics of food. Through the eyes and the nose of the Armenian-American girl Armanoush we sense the olfactory quality of the sexiness of an edible city: The breeze shifted direction just then, and Armanoush caught a pungent whiff of the sea. This city was a jumble of aromas, some of them strong and rancid, others sweet and stimulating. Almost every smell made Armanoush recall some sort of food, so much so that she had started to perceive Istanbul as something edible. (The Bastard 246) The city has metamorphosed into a communal feast to be relished beyond a cursed history. Like Ömer who craves for Turkish raki in Boston only to find Greek ouzo, Armanoush will remain a stranger in a strangeland, whether in Istanbul, Tucson or some other city. And yet, even strangers may mysteriously fall for such strangelands. “Life is coincidence,” Shafak’s narrator claims in the end, “though sometimes it takes a djinni [i.e. a ghost or demon] to fathom that” (The Bastard 356). Whether this is meant to be taken as witty irony or at face value is for the reader to decide. Bastardized History 229 Works Cited Adelson, Leslie A. “Against Between: A Manifesto.” New Perspectives on Turkey 28-29 (2003): 19-36. Bech, Henning. “Citysex: Representing Lust in Public.” Paper presented at Geographies of Desire Conference, Netherlands’ Universities Institute for Co-ordination of Research in Social Sciences, Amsterdam, 1993. Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Brooker, Peter. Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Döring, Tobias, Markus Heide, and Susanne Mühleisen, eds. Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Hassan, Ihab. “Cities of Mind, Urban Words: The Dematerialization of Metropolis in Contemporary American Fiction.” Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981. 93-112. Kandiyoti, Deniz, and Ay ş e Saktanber, eds. Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Kennedy, David. Elegy. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Keyder, Ça ğ lar. “The Housing Market from Informal to Global.” Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Ed. Ça ğ lar Keyder. Lanham et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 143-59. Knopp, Lawrence. “Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis.” Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. Ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 149-61. Marx, Leo. “The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature.” Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981. 63-80. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961. Nichanian, Marc. Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Gomidas Inst., 2002. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Ramazani, Jahan. “A Transnational Poetics.” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 332- 359. Shafak, Elif, Minae Mizumura, and Shan Sa. “Crossover Artists: Writing in Another Language.” PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 7 (2006): 24-31. ---. “Accelerating the Flow of Time: Soft Power and the Role of Intellectuals in Turkey.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 80.1 (2006): 24-26. ---. “Migrations: A Meridians Interview with Elif Shafak.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4.1 (2003): 55-85. ---. “Transgender Bolero.” Middle East Report 230 (2004): 26-29, 47. R ALPH J. P OOLE 230 ---. The Bastard of Istanbul. New York et al.: Viking, 2007. ---. The Saint of Insipient Insanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Simmel, Georg. “Bridge and Door.” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London et al.: Sage, 1997. 170-74. Simmel, Georg. “Sociology of the Meal.” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London et al: Sage, 1997. 130-35. Talib, Ismail S. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. A STRID M. F ELLNER ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and the Challenges of Urbanity Introduction With the city central to her narrative, Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005) opens with an evocative description of Toronto: THIS CITY HOVERS above the forty-third parallel; that’s illusory of course. Winters on the other hand, there’s nothing vague about them. Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving. […] Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring? Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing. (Brand 1) What We All Long For is a novel that offers a portrayal of modern day Canadian urban life. The text carefully ponders the multiracial color and polyphonic sound of the urban realities of Toronto. Brand, as one reviewer has put it, “makes the emotion of longing tangible. She lifts it into the air so we can see what we’re feeling. But she also tells a compelling story of characters immersed in the Toronto cityscape” (Turner n.p.). What We All Long For is a story about identity; it is a tale of longing and loss in a cosmopolitan city. No other writer, critics have agreed, has presented such a powerful and richly textured portrait of present-day Toronto. Rinaldo Walcott, for instance, writes in The Globe and Mail: “every great city has its literary moments, and contemporary Toronto has been longing for one. We can now say with certainty that we no longer have to long for a novel that speaks this city’s uniqueness: Dionne Brand has given us exactly that.” 1 Toronto, as another critic has observed, “is alive with everyone’s stories, interactions and longings, and Brand’s characters do not only live in the city, they are of and in love with Toronto” (Thorpe 57). Clearly though, What We All Long For is not only about a particular Canadian city. More generally, Toronto refers to any late modern metropolitan city, a space of “commodity phantasmagoria” (Chisholm, Queer 49) and cosmopolitanism, in which multicultural life is troubled by diasporic haunting, which, in turn, gives rise to feelings of longing. What We All Long For accentuates a complex dialectic between social exclusions in Canada and 1 Cited on <http: / / www.randomhouse.ca/ catalog/ display.pperl? isbn=9780676971675> (accessed 7 Sep. 2010). A STRID M. F ELLNER 232 the careful attempts of its characters to identify what they long for despite their sense of alienation and dislocation. This story of four young Torontonians is a powerfully metaphorical text because Brand manages to translate the energy of urban Toronto into a transcultural poetics of the city. Glimpses of the city provide detailed insight into urban life: the daily cultural mix of Kensington Market, the rain-soaked celebrations of the world cup in Korea Town, different means of transportation, such as the streetcar, the subway, the bicycle and the car. All of these images come together in dialectical Benjaminian fashion, creating a transcultural space that is characterized by fragmentation, dislocation and the various contradictions of urban experience. In the following analysis, I will look at Brand’s transcultural poetics, paying attention to the multiple ways in which this Caribbean-Canadian writer captures the diverse experiences of living on the different borders of identity in Toronto - be they national, cultural, ethnic/ racial or sexual. 2 The text, I want to argue, offers a queer representation of urban space, constituting what Dianne Chisholm calls a “queer constellation” of metropolitan writings. 3 Toronto is rendered as a space of cultural translation, a contact zone in which the protagonists translate the city’s cultural and spatial divisions by creating points of contact that, on the one hand, open up dialogues between different groups of people and, on the other, create silences that point to failed encounters. I also want to investigate the feminist environmental ethics and politics that are inherent in Brand’s construction of a queer subjectivity, pointing out in what ways Brand redefines the notion of community as bonds and allegiances that nest identities within larger global and social structures of involvement. Born in the City from People Born Elsewhere Like any other modern city, Toronto is a place of masses of humanity and inhumanity, an imagined place that constitutes an “imagined environment” (Donald n.p.) that cannot be conceived in its totality. Any person’s experience of a city, one could argue, is bound to remain partial to a fragment of the city. Emphasizing the multiplicity of the city, Brand’s novel is a fragmented narrative that offers different viewpoints of Toronto. It creates an urban 2 A black, lesbian feminist, Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad in 1953 and immigrated to Toronto at the age of seventeen where in the 1970s she was part of the black and feminist liberation movements. Well-known for her award-winning poetry and fiction, she has also published non-fiction, which includes “a collection of oral histories about the struggles of people of colour in Toronto, a history of black women, and an autobiographical meditation on Blackness in the Diaspora” (Goldman 95). For more biographical information on Dionne Brand, see also <http: / / www.nwpassages.com/ bios/ brand.asp> (accessed 7 July 2010). In 2009, Brand became Toronto’s third poet laureate. 3 See Chisholm’s Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (2004). ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 233 borderland region that emerges at the intersection of transnational flows of people. The text follows the overlapping stories of a close circle of young adults. The protagonists are second-generation immigrants who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. There are Caribbean-Canadian, Portuguese- Canadian, Vietnamese-Canadian, and Africadian 4 characters who feel estranged from their cultural roots. All characters suffer from traumatic memories, from family trauma that is part of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory,” which characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences. (22) Brand’s characters are haunted by their families’ stories but they are also united by their rejection of their parents’ past, which is a distant past of “other houses, other landscapes, other skies, other trees” (Brand 20). Tuyen, for instance, is the daughter of Vietnamese parents who have never recovered from losing one of their children in the rush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. 5 Their only son Quy was separated from his parents and ended up in a Malaysian refugee camp, where he grew up as an orphan. His sister Tuyen, who was born after her brother’s disappearance, now tries to make sense of her family history and her identity through her work as an avant-garde artist. She moves to a chaotic apartment in downtown Toronto and uses her history and, above all, the city, as the subject of her installation art. She is in love with her best friend and neighbor Carla, a biracial bicycle courier, who is also troubled by her family history. Carla is still reeling from the loss of her mother to suicide eighteen years earlier and must now deal with her brother Jamal’s acts of delinquency. Because Carla and Tuyen are both negotiating difficult relationships with their brothers, they are emotionally so strained that any developing eroticism between them is complicated. Carla arduously traverses the city on her bicycle; bike riding not only energizes her body and soul but also constitutes a way of making sense of the city and her position in it. With a Portuguese mother and a black Caribbean father, Carla is not “phenotypically black” (Brand 106) and could easily “disappear into this white world” (Brand 106), but out of respect for her mother, whose family disinherited her after she 4 The term Africadian was coined by George Elliott Clarke in order to refer to Blacks who settled in the maritime provinces of Canada in the eighteenth century. See Clarke 3-23. See also Rosenthal 231. 5 Tyen’s family were so-called “Vietnamese boat people.” For more information see the online exhibition “Leaving Vietnam” at <http: / / www.civilization.ca/ cmc/ exhibitions/ cultur/ vietnam/ vilea01e.shtml> (accessed 27 July 2010). A STRID M. F ELLNER 234 started to date a black man, she chooses to identify as a visibly different minority. The third protagonist is Oku, a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknownst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of university and is in constant conflict with his father. He is also tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a black woman who runs a clothing shop on Queen Street West but prefers to date a white man. Jackie, the fourth protagonist, also feels alienated from her parents. Each of these characters in the novel felt as if they inhabited two countries - their parents’ and their own - when they sat dutifully at their kitchen tables being regaled with how life used to be “back home” […]. Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents. Breaking their doorways, they left the sleepwalk of their mothers and fathers and ran across the unobserved borders of the city, sliding across ice to arrive at their own birthplace - the city. They were born in the city from people born elsewhere. (Brand 20) Linked together through their “unspoken collaboration on distancing themselves as far as possible from the unreasonableness, the ignorance, the secrets, and the madness of their parents” (Brand 19), the young protagonists of What We All Long For are characterized “by transcending spatial and ethnic boundaries and by forging new cultural practices that no longer follow the ‘roots/ routes’ of ethnic belonging” (Rosenthal 232). There is a fifth main character, Quy, the child who Tuyen’s parents lost in Vietnam. Unlike the other protagonists, his story is a first-person narrative, which is graphically set apart from the other chapters as they lack numbering and fail to appear in full justification. The chapters in which Quy’s voice appears are at odds with the rest of the book, pointing to his extreme marginalized position. Quy is representative of the many refugees who did not make it out of Vietnam. Crucially, his chapters are headed by his name and the descriptions of how the young boy survived in various refugee camps, then moved into the Thai underworld, and finally made it to Toronto on his own. The lost boy is thereby given a voice in this novel, and his appearance at the end of the text triggers a crescendo, which also brings together the story’s fragments in a shocking culmination point. “Queer Constellations” By presenting the consequences of diaspora on the lives of second-generation immigrants in metropolitan Toronto, What We All Long For constitutes an experiment in urban realism. It shows how the protagonists’ lives are tangled with the city and how they become “defined by the city” (Brand 66). In rendering different urban practices of claiming space, such as the diverse forms of flâneries of Carla and the artistic techniques of graffiti and montage ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 235 in the creative work of Tuyen, the novel carves out a queer urban space. According to Dianne Chisholm, a queer space demarcates a practice, production, and performance of space beyond just the mere habitation of built and fixed structures. Against the domination of space by abstract constructs of urban planning and the implantation of technologies of social surveillance, queer space designates an appropriation of space for bodily, especially sexual, pleasure. (Chisholm, Queer 10) By questioning coherent narratives of nationhood and remaining skeptical of celebratory accounts of Canadian multiculturalism, Brand offers an alternative story of (be-)longing. Tracing the “wandering paths and the solitary spaces familiar to those who have been dislocated” (Goldman, “Mapping” 14), Brand offers fluid textual maps of the city that critically expose the “city’s mobilizing, yet spellbinding and anesthetizing, phantasmagoria” (Chisholm, Queer 31). Brand’s characters strategically lose themselves in space, the “space of city memory” (Chisholm, “City” 197), and they use the city in order to express their longings for a new era that recognizes the paradoxes of metropolitan (post)modernity. Longing for a queer space, the characters give voice to their stories, which are incoherent and fragmented narratives of dislocation, non-belonging, and queer sexuality. Employing strategies for appropriating space, the characters traverse and criss-cross the city, and they navigate their ways through capitalism’s power grid. Their queer interrogations of space entail a blasting apart of the city’s narrative of progress and constitute a reassembling of the fragments of collective history into dialectical images that encapsulate the diverse stories of deterritorializations. 6 Jean-Ulrick Désert has elaborated on these deconstructive strategies of appropriations of queer city space: Queer space crosses, engages, and transgresses social, spiritual, and aesthetic locations, all of which is articulated in the realm of the public/ private, the built/ unbuilt environments. […] A queer space is an activated zone made proprietary by the occupant or flâneur, the wanderer. It is at once private and public. […] Our cities and landscapes double as queer spaces. […] the square, the streets, the civic centers, the malls, the highways are the place of fortuitous encounters and juxtapositions. It is a place in which our sensibilities are tested; it is the place of “show.” The public space is the space of romance, seen as landscape, alleys and cafés. The public space is the space of power in the form of corporations or factories. It is the (blue, white, or pink collar) ghetto of the everyday. This fluid and wholly unstructured space allows, in its publicity, a variety of readings, re- 6 My definition of the term queer relies on David Halperin’s view that “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (62). If we regard “queerness” as a position and not as a non-identity, then the vagueness inherent in the term “queer” turns out to be its biggest strength. As Lee Edelman has it, the indeterminacy, transformability, and elasticity of the concept of queer suggests an understanding of queerness as a continuum or “a zone of possibilities” (114). A STRID M. F ELLNER 236 readings, and misreadings, given the observer’s individual propensities toward power, mystery, and how these desires fold into the passive space of Eros […] a space where desire intertwines with visceral sensibility, in the space of the everyday. (20-22) In its reliance on a transcultural poetics, What We All Long For draws on Walter Benjamin’s method of dialectical imaging in order to visualize their spatial practices. Infusing Benjamin’s theories on city writings with a queer postcolonial agenda, Brand offers what Chisholm calls “queer constellations,” that is “dialectical images of (queer) city/ space as represented through a variety of optical and perceptual devices” (Chisholm, Queer 10). In doing so, Brand clearly relies on her sensibilities as a poet. Her lyrical prose functions as “a technology of perception with which to grasp metropolitan contemporaneity” (Chisholm, “Paris” 156). Seeing the city in dialectical images, Brand’s novel, for instance, records “flâneries in Benjaminian space” (Chisholm, “Paris” 161). Most prominently, it is Carla, who moves through the city. 7 Although Carla is a bicycle courier, she sometimes is also a walker: It was Monday, and sometimes she liked to take Monday off just to go in the opposite direction of the world hustling past her with its Monday morning anxieties. […] Monday was the day of mistakes, which is also why she was glad to be off the road, her bicycle weaving in and out of traffic, trying to negotiate opening car doors and being squeezed at right turns. Mondays, she preferred to walk. (Brand 41) Flânerie, as Chisholm puts it, “is a primary documentary technique for queer interrogations of urban space” (Queer 46). Carla’s city walks are, however, different. While the classic flâneur is a “figure of bourgeois disaffection, a type of social drop-out who strolls the streets of the industrial capital against the accelerating flow of commercial traffic” (Chisholm, “Paris” 162), Carla is a female biracial flâneuse who can only afford to stroll through the city on Mondays. 8 As she states, Carla loved these Mondays the way she loved snowstorms. The way these two things stopped the world. A city hemmed in by snow was a beautiful thing to her. Cars buried in the streets, people bewildered as they should be, aimless and 7 For a detailed discussion of the character of Carla as a flâneuse, see Rosenthal 237-40. Interestingly, Rosenthal reads the figure of Carla as a “past-postmodern” flâneuse (235). In her article, Rosenthal, however, does not make a distinction between Carla’s walks and her bike rides. While I also interpret Carla’s practice of biking as a form of wandering that evokes the concept of flânerie, I want to make a case for biking as the novel’s preferred concept of spatial practice because it seems the more fitting concept for an antineoliberal, working-class stance that the novel clearly endorses. 8 Originally, flânerie is a form of strolling that was an “urban art form, a leisure habit, made famous by dandies, such as the poet Baudelaire, not the healthy exercise of strolling or walking, spazieren, prescribed by doctors as a means to ward off melancholy” (Hanssen 3). ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 237 directionless as they really are. Snowstorms stopped the pretence of order and civilization. (Brand 105) Snowstorms constitute positive disturbing forces and are elements of nature that allow for Carla’s counter-strategic spatial practices. Despite all premonitions by weathermen and her friends, Carla “would turn and turn in the blizzard and be lost, walk with it, walk against it, driving her feet through the thick gathering wall of it” (Brand 105). Carla’s Monday walks not only evoke the concept of the flâneur, but they also echo Michel de Certeau’s notion of “walking the city.” According to de Certeau, “to walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper” (103). In Brand’s novel, as Caroline Rosenthal has observed, “this experience of ‘lacking a place’ is related to the multiple displacements of subjects in the Diaspora and to how the younger generation embraces the ‘placeless place’ of the city as the end of traceable origins” (239). Clearly, the “placeless place” is a queer urban space, a space of indeterminacy that has the potential of turning into Edelman’s “zone of possibility” (114). Brand’s story, however, does not only focus on Carla. Tuyen also engages in a project of queer investigations and possible transformations of urban space. Her work as an installation artist stands out as an attempt to represent the “polyphonic, murmuring” (Brand 149) of the city and is in itself representative of Brand’s construction of queer constellations. For her project, Tuyen engages in ethnographic work and asks customers who enter her brother Binh’s electronics store one specific question: “What do you long for? ” Her hope is to capture the multifarious longings of the city and to attach them to a huge installation figure that fills her apartment and starts to outgrow it. This “lubiao” (Brand 16, emphasis in the original), as Tuyen calls it, collects the elliptical answers she receives. As Tuyen describes her installation project: “You know those fake carved posts they’ve put in the middle of the road down on Spadina? In Chinatown? Well, they’re kitch down there, but they’re supposed to be signposts. Like long ago people would pin messages against the government and shit like that on them. So my installation is to reclaim ... Of course, regular electric posts already have notices on them like flyers and stuff ... Well, I still have to think it all through, but ...“ Breaking off, she explained the plan to make a pulley with a seat so that she could move up and down the lubaio, engraving and encrusting figures and signs. At the planned installation, which was to be her most ambitious, she would have the audience post messages on the lubaio. Messages to the city. (Brand 16-17, emphases and ellipses in the original) Tuyen’s installation is a spatial practice, capturing the art of dialectical imaging by presenting an image of the past that carries the desires of the past generations into the present. It represents the queer space of the city and the space of city history - the history of dislocation, of non-belonging, of fragmentation, of queer sexuality - in montage. Collecting quotations, this A STRID M. F ELLNER 238 lubiao installation represents statements which are not incorporated into official history or which are lost in the fragmentation of perception that characterizes urban experiences. As a monstrous piece of art that is out of place in Tuyen’s apartment, the lubiao signifies the transcultural queer poetics of the novel itself. Of Bikes and Cars Apart from pedestrian urban practices and creative art work that aim at transforming the urban environment, Brand’s constellations of queer cityspace also entail images of means of transportation that serve as powerful connecting devices of cultural translation. Crucially then, means of transportation become means of translation. References to urban transportation already dominate the beginning of the novel. The first chapter frames the diverse stories and images that the book contains. The main characters are described as riding the Bloor-Danforth subway as it “rumbles across the bridge over the Humber River” (Brand 2). Brand invokes the riding of public transit as a device to catalogue the astonishing diversity of the city. More importantly though, means of transportation are important as they allow for cross-town voyages of people. They connect spaces, creating points of contact in a dialogue that also includes what Sherry Simon calls “zones of silence” (9), areas where translations break down, where encounters fail and hostility and violence break out. These two divergent points of contact that constitute the challenges of urbanity are symbolized in the text by two different means of transportation - the bicycle and the car. In particular, I want to argue, that it is the bicycle that functions as a powerful symbol of cultural translation. It constitutes a vehicle that cuts across multiple borderlines, exposing the city’s fragments as areas of discontinuity in which something new is created, culturally and economically. Carla’s job as a bicycle courier clearly points to her role as a cultural translator. In her acts of translation, she mediates between her brother and her father and tries to make sense of her life and the totality of the city. She is longing for a coherent sense of self by exploring different areas of the city on her bicycle. Like Tuyen, she serves as the link between the generation of the parents and their children. Tuyen functions as a translator as well. When growing up, Tuyen was considered a mediator by her parents: “For Tuan and Cam, the children were their interpreters, their annotators and paraphrasts, across the confusion of their new life” (Brand 67). Crucially, neither parents in the novel are depicted as holding on to a nostalgic view of their home countries. Their ethnic origins are also not seen as obstacles to integration in Canada. Instead - much to their children’s criticism - they offer “endorsements both of a sanitized ethnic heritage and an uncritical consumerist lifestyle” (Chariandy 104). They are shown to favor mainstream neo-liberal ideologies, which the children vehemently oppose. The alienation ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 239 of the young generation in the novel, as David Chariandy has put it, “has little to do with the ‘foreign’ traditions and manners that they have either rejected or adapted towards their own ends, but with the plain and apparently non-negotiable fact of being instantly read, in their country of birth, as racial minority ‘others’” (106). Their alienation, one might add, also roots in their endorsement of an anti-neoliberal and environmentally friendly politics. Most strikingly, however, alienation stems from feelings that remain unexpressed between parents and children. Tuyen’s parents consider themselves “newly rich” (Brand 54). They never openly talk about the traumatic experience of having lost their son. Tuyen only finds out about her lost brother through a photograph, a letter and uncanny emotions such as the “strange outbursts and crying” of her parents (Brand 226). As the narrator explains: “She not so much overheard as sensed, since her own understanding of Vietnamese was deliberately minimal” (Brand 65). Tuyen and her friends “encounter their ancestors’ legacies of displacement and disenfranchisement not through official histories or even family tales, but through a doubly unwilled circulation of feeling” (Chariandy 106). In Brand’s novel, “the second generation thus awakens to its diasporic legacy not through conscious communication, but through an unconscious transmission of affect” (Chariandy 106). It is the task of the children to translate this level of affect to a politics of communication that allows for agency. While Tuyen translates loss and absence into her art, Carla consciously uses her bike as an outlet for her problems. Reveling in the city’s “raw openness” (Brand 212), Carla uses the street because, like her friends, she sees “the street outside, its chaos, as [her] only hope” (Brand 212). As a bicycle messenger, Carla translates Toronto, trying to make sense of urban life and conveying the feelings of the young generation to the reader. In her descriptions of the city, Toronto figures as a site of the transmission of affect, a contact zone whose contact is made possible through the practice of bike riding. Describing the entire city like a body, the narrator sums up Carla’s bike rides in the following way: The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who lived across the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. […] she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it, the triangulating girders now possessed by the graffiti crew. She loved the feeling of weight and balance it gave her. (Brand 32) As Rosenthal puts it: “While space is […] used to externalize a character’s emotional geography in What We All Long For, Brand also employs Carla’s bike rides, which lead her into abandoned and residual spaces, to highlight the resourceful and imaginative quality of liminal spaces in the city” (238). Carla views her bicycle as a vehicle for re-organizing space, as her only A STRID M. F ELLNER 240 means to transmit affect. This act of translation is personal and cultural. Crucially though, translation here is not seen as a mail-service that delivers culture from one distant site to another but as the source of culture “at home,” on site. Culture is born in translation, that is, in relationships of exchange, resistance, or interpretation. (Simon 17, emphasis in the original) Translation makes something visible which otherwise is hidden and can constitute a tool that helps to shed light on the spaces of differences that emerge in cultural contact. 9 Conceptualized as a process rather than as a product, it can become an important tool for analyzing cultural contact (cf. Simon 17). In What We All Long For, the protagonists’ projects of translation highlight “zones of silences,” focusing on affective encounters in which translation breaks down and difference is revealed most visibly. As an environmentally friendly means of transport, the bike stands for an alternative vehicle that through the translation of bodily action and energy into locomotion allows for the transmission of culture. Translation, as Sherry Simon reminds us, “includes direction or vectorality (always including the ‘from’ and the ‘to’ of cultural interactions)” (17). Biking emphasizes movement and is an urban practice that, as the novel suggests, is a more fitting metaphor in the mapping of queer spaces in the urban environment than the practice of walking. Riding a bicycle is dangerous, precarious, and often at odds with cars. Usually, bicycles have to share space with cars; they function in a liminal space between pedestrians and cars, existing in a nonspace but, crucially, creating space between objects. Carla’s practice of biking can therefore be considered a form of flânerie with a difference: it is causerelated, constituting an economic necessity, but it goes against the neo-liberal North American car culture. It is a counter-strategic practice because it reinscribes space by allowing the character to forge links and connections between different spaces and elements of the city. Juxtaposed to the bike is the car, which is rendered as a powerful symbol of destruction in Brand’s novel. Crucially, men drive cars in this book: Carla’s father owns a black Audi and Tyen’s brother Binh a Beamer X5. Like bikes, cars stand for translation practices, but while the bike constitutes a peaceful, ecologically safe means of translation that advocates dialogue, the car is an aggressive symbol that stands for excessive contact and cultural 9 Benjamin has famously argued that translation is less about transmitting a message than it is about revealing differences. Interpretative translation, following Benjamin, stands like a wall before the original language; literal translation, by contrast, functions like an arcade. As he famously explained in “The Task of the Translator”: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade” (“Task of the Translator” 79). ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 241 interpenetration. While Carla tries to make sense of the world by riding her bike, her brother, Jamal, is obsessed with cars; in fact, he is a car jacker. As the narrator describes Jamal’s relation to the city: Jamal didn’t see the city as she did. His life was in his skin, in his mouth, in his eyes, in the closest physical encounters. He operated only on his senses as far as Carla was concerned. But she saw the city as a set of obstacles to be crossed and circled, avoided and let pass. He saw it as something to get tangled in. (Brand 32) Jamal would rather live on the streets than go to school and deal with parents at home. Jamal, as we learn, is in trouble all the time and his sister has to bail him out of jail. In the concluding chapter that brings together the story’s fragments, Tuyen’s long-lost brother Quy is about to return home, but, crucially, the re-union is interrupted by brutal violence. On the last pages of the novel, the narrator describes Quy as he is waiting in the car just before he goes into his parents’ house to re-united with them. At this point Jamal is out of jail and together with a friend happens to come to precisely this rich neighborhood where Tuyen’s parents live. He approaches Quy in the car and then attacks him. As the narrator describes this scene: He [Quy] realizes that they want the car, and he says, “Take the fucking car,” in Vietnamese, but no one understands him. So they beat him and kick him beyond recognition and Jamal jumps in the silver Beamer X5 and his friend takes the Audi and they drive away, leaving the man half-dead by the road. (Brand 318) The book ends with this unexpected twist that simultaneously connects and tears apart fragmented families. Where the bike tried to connect fractured identities of people and their stories by crossing, circling, avoiding and letting pass the obstacles and elements of the city, the car violently interrupts this process. At this point of collision of boundaries, the wounds of displacement are painfully opened up again. The novel quietly ends with the image of the parents running towards their long-lost son, and Carla waiting at home, longing to listen to Tuyen work on her installation project. The zone of silence that is created through unsuccessful translation at the end of the novel, however, opens up a new space: it constitutes an awakening to a new sense of longing. The novel thus concludes by hinging on the cusp of cultural translation: the zone of silence that arises out of failed encounters speaks the language of desire, expressing a yearning for a renewed attempt at the transformation of urban environment. Conclusion As I have shown, What We All Long For is a fragmented narrative that interweaves stories of survival, humor, failure, and brutal violence. It is a multi-voiced novel that renders the “city’s heterogeneity” (Brand 142) and the “polyphonic murmurings” (Brand 149) of cosmopolitan space in which A STRID M. F ELLNER 242 different people meet and also clash. It captures the various intersecting stories the city can barely contain. Lives in the city are doubled, tripled, conjugated - women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, it’s impossible to tell one thread from another. (Brand 5) The text is centered around the many contradictions “of an inherently globalized world and focuses on Toronto as a typically cosmopolitan city” (Goulart Almeida 10). Brand manages to transform hegemonic spatial and temporal paradigms into what Rinaldo Walcott has called Brand’s “diaspora sensibilities” (Walcott 46). She remaps Toronto’s cityspace in order to “announce and articulate a black presence that signals defiance, survival and renewal” (Walcott 45). Brand’s politics is a transcultural poetics fused with environmental ethics and a queer agenda, which, to quote Paul Gilroy, goes against the “simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness” (123). 10 As What We All Long For chronicles the everyday lives of four young urban, diasporic subjects, the city figures as a cultural space in which the traumatic histories of social expulsion and cultural displacement are being negotiated and transformed. As a city of longing, Toronto becomes an urban space of desire that is filled with diasporic haunting. Through cultural translation, it becomes a site of dialogue as well as a space of failed encounters that result in hostility. The city is a queer space that dwells on an understanding of cultures as transient and as such is at odds with dominant paradigms; it does not offer any closure but continues to hinge on the edge. Giving rise to a transcultural narrative that refuses to solve conflicts, it constitutes a space where the past both succeeds and fails to be translated into the future. 10 Part of this point is taken from Marlene Goldman. For more information on Brand’s mapping of urban space and, in particular, the role of haunting in the production of space in Brand’s works, see Goldman’s “Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand.” ‘Translating Toronto on a Bicycle’ 243 Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 69-82. Beuregard, Guy. “What We All Long For? Dionne Brand and the Politics of Reading ‘Cultural Diversity in Canada.” <http: / / ocs.sfu.ca/ aclals/ viewabstract.php? id=41> (7 Sep. 2006): 20 July 2010. Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2005. Chariandy, David. “What We All Long For by Dionne Brand.” New Dawn 1.1 (2006): 103-09. Chisholm, Dianne: “The City of Collective Memory.” GLQ 7.2 (2001): 195-243. ---. “Paris, Mon Amour, My Catastrophe, or Flâneries through Benjaminian Space.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 153-207. ---. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Clarke, George Elliot. “Embarkation: Discovering African-Canadian Literature.” Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 3-23. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006).” Cross-Talk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Ed. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvorak. 7 July 2010 <http: / / myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/ Documents/ 2099/ Portraits%20of%20the%20Ar tist%20in%20Brand%20and%20ThienCuder.pdf> (accessed 22 July 2010). De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 13-28. Désert, Jean-Ulrick. “Queer Space.” Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of Resistance. Ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette and Yolanda Retter. Seattle: Bay P, 1996. 17-26. Donald, James. “Metropolis: The City as Text.” Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity. Ed. R. Bocock and K. Thompson. Cambridge: Polity P, 1992. 417-61. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Goldman, Marlene. “Mapping the Door of No Return: Deterritorialization and the Work of Dionne Brand.” Canadian Literature 182 (Autumn 2004): 13-28. Goldman, Marlene. “Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand.” Space and Gender - Espace et Genre. Urban and Other Spaces in Canadian Women’s Fiction/ Espaces urbains et autres dans la fiction canadienne au feminine. Eds. Doris Eibl and Caroline Rosenthal. Innsbruck: U of Innsbruck P, 2009. 95-108. Goulart Almeida, Sandra Regina. “Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities.” Cross-Talk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Ed. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvorak. 07 Sept. 2010 <http: / / myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/ Documents/ 2112/ UnsettlingVoicesAlmeidaSrevised.pdf>. Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. A STRID M. F ELLNER 244 Hanssen, Beatrice. “Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamins’s Peregrinations Through Paris in Search of a New Imaginary.” Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project. Ed. Beatrice Hanssen. London: Continuum, 2006. 1-11. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Rosenthal, Caroline. “Transgressing the ‘Poetics of the Anglicized City’: The Figure of the Flâneuse in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.” Space and Gender - Espace et Genre. Urban and Other Spaces in Canadian Women’s Fiction/ Espaces urbains et autres dans la fiction canadienne au feminine. Eds. Doris Eibl and Caroline Rosenthal. Innsbruck: U of Innsbruck P, 2009. 231-45. Simon, Sherry: Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Thorpe, Jocelyn. “What We All Long For.” Review. Women & Environments International Magazine (Fall 2005): 68-69. Turner, Jaqueline. “What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand.” 07 Sept. 2010 <http: / / www.straight.com/ article/ what-we-all-long-for-by-dionne-brand>. V. Sounding Nature - Reading Nature in the Age of Environmental Crises B ERND H ERZOGENRATH A ‘Meteorology of Sound’: Composing Nature in the 20 th and 21 st Centuries Is there a ‘meteorology of sound’? What is the ‘weather of music? ’ In seminal works of Classical music which refer to the seasons [Schumann’s Symphony No 1 (“Frühling”|“Spring”), Gershwin’s “Summertime,” or Vivialdi’s The Four Seasons], and|or to the weather, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 (“Pastorale”|”The Pastoral Symphony”), with its fourth movement ‘Thunderstorm,’ composers were primarily concerned with an acoustic|musical translation of subjective sense perceptions, i.e., with a representation of nature and natural forces. In this article, however, I am more interested in the question if there is a connection between nature, weather and music beyond representation, if weather phenomena themselves can be music, and if music itself can be ‘meteorological.’ My first thesis is the following: whereas the composers of the 18 th and 19 th centuries were mainly interested in the representation of the subjective effects of weather phenomena, modern avant-garde composers more and more focus on the reproduction of the processes and dynamics of the weather as a system ‘on the edge of chaos.’ My second thesis is related to the first, but more specific in terms of space and time: a particular American modernist tradition in music from Charles Ives via John Cage to John Luther Adams not only starts with the writings of Henry David Thoreau - Thoreau already provides an aesthetics of music, the radicalism of which is only being followed up today. 1 Let me first point out the particularity of Thoreau's musical aesthetics and ‘musical ecology.’ In 1851, Thoreau notes an acoustic experience in his journals that reveals his particular sensibility to the sonic environment: Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly […] the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid (Journal III: 11). Far from being an isolated case, Thoreau focuses on the ‘sound of nature’ - and in particular the ‘sound of the weather’ - in various other entries in his journals: “Nature makes no noise. The howling storm, the rustling leaf, the pattering rain are no disturbance, there is an essential and unexplored harmony in them” (Journal I: 12). Thoreau is exploring the audible world like a 1 And it should be noted that this radicalism makes Thoreau a patron saint not only of music, but also of ecology. B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 248 sound-archaeologist, carefully distinguishing ‘sound’ from ‘music: ’ 2 “now I see the beauty and full meaning of that word ‘sound.’ Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice […] which indicates her sound state” (Journal I: 226-7). What Thoreau is pointing at is the fact that nature itself produces what one today might call ‘ambient music,’ or ‘ambient sound.’ Thoreau’s sensitivity for environmental sounds heralds an avant-garde aesthetic in music that starts with the work of Charles Ives. That Ives, and Cage and Adams as well, were effectively influenced by Thoreau is beyond question - see the work of Frank Mehring or Christopher Shultis. However, I am interested more in the particular inspirations these composers draw from Thoreau’s aesthetics, and how they made this inspiration fruitful for their own aesthetics. Let me begin with Ives’s reading of Thoreau and Ives’s Weather of Music’ as Metaphor. Charles Ives - The ‘Weather of Music’ as Metaphor Far from the madding crowds, metropolises and music centers of the world, against every ‘trend’ in late 19 th Century Classical music, Ives composed his music in Danbury, Connecticut, a music that was intimately related to New England Transcendentalism, a literary-philosophical ‘movement’ that can be understood both as a secular brand of American Puritanism, and as ‘American Romanticism,’ since it drew its inspiration from that of which America had in abundance - Nature (with a capital N). American Transcendentalism is inextricably linked with the names Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. While Emerson’s metaphysical and idealistic [in the sense of a Hegelian Idealism] brand of Transcendentalism made him the philosophical spokesman of the movement, his disciple Thoreau followed a much more materialist and ‘physical’ philosophy, without however completely casting off the Emersonian Metaphysics. This seemingly small difference in the initial conditions will have important effects, since Thoreau’s ambivalence in this matter will result in the contrasting readings of his work by Ives and Cage respectively. Ives was a dyed-in-the-wool Transcendentalist, who promoted Thoreau to private patron saint for his own conception of music. In an essay on Thoreau, Ives emphasizes that “if there shall be a program for our music, let it follow [Thoreau’s] thought on an autumn day of Indian summer at Walden …” (Essays 67). In these 1920 Essays Before a Sonata, which Ives conceived as a literary counterpart to his Piano Sonata No 2 (“Concord”-Sonata), Ives sum- 2 See also Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and his|its concept of “wildness.” ‘Sound’ can be understood as ‘wildness’ with regard to ‘music’ [as sound organized by a traditional composer] - the unformed, unintended, untamed in comparison to John Sullivan Dwight’s canonization in Thoreau’s time of European Classical Music [and in particular the compositions of Beethoven] as the paradigm for a future American Music. A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 249 marizes his understanding of the central idea of Emersonian Transcendentalism, which is also the guiding tenet of his own work: Is it not this courageous universalism that gives conviction to [Emerson’s] prophecy, and that makes his symphonies of revelation begin and end with nothing but the strength and beauty of innate goodness in man, in Nature and in God - the greatest and most inspiring theme of Concord Transcendental philosophy … ? (Essays 35) If Ives’s phrase “symphonies of revelation” refers to both Emerson’s visionary power and the ‘musicality’ of his oratorical prose, Ives also finds these very qualities in Thoreau’s writings: Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘The Symphony.’ The rhythm of his prose […] would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms, and the harmony of her solitude. (Essays 51) The reason for Ives’s reference to both Emerson and Thoreau can be found in the observation that Ives reads Thoreau’s ‘materialist’ sound-aesthetics on the foil of Emerson’s Idealism, according to which nature is the expression (and effect) of reason: “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (“Nature”’ 24). As has been pointed out, in Emerson’s work, the “subject’s triumph over nature” takes center stage (see Schulz 117). Defining intuition and imagination as primary sources of a creative comprehension of Truth, for Emerson, the creative subject attains a Divine status because of its ability to read and translate the metaphoricity of nature - “Whoever creates is God” (Journals V: 341). Thoreau, in contrast, stresses the material and sensual aspects of nature - “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life […]. Is not Nature […] that of which she is commonly taken to be a symbol merely? ” (A Week 307). Thoreau does not read nature like Emerson does, he does not interpret nature according to an external spiritual principle - such a principle, because of nature’s manifoldness, is immanent to it. For Thoreau, nature and its ‘music’ are not only “God’s voice, the divine breath audible” (Journal I: 154), but also - and maybe even first and foremost - “the sound of circulation in nature’s veins” (Journal I: 251). It is in this stress on nature as sensuous experience and materiality that Thoreau ‘deviates’ from Emerson. Thoreau focuses on [the music of] nature as a material, physical process, not as an Emersonian emblem of reason: “The very globe continually transcends and translates itself. […] The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth” (Walden 306-7). Thoreau understands “transcending” as a “physical process” - as the dynamics of metamorphosis, of continuous change - as LIFE. For Emerson, in contrast, nature is the manifestation of the spirit, of reason, and the ‘music of nature’ is spirit|reason expressing itself, is thus pure transcendence, pure metaphysics. B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 250 Even if Ives is following Thoreau in his music aesthetics and makes the sonority of the world his main principle, he is mainly interested in the sonority of the human world, which he does not reproduce, but represent, and which he generates from various quotations and samples taken from European Classical music and American popular tunes and liturgical music. Ives does not only compose ‘nature,’ but also complex cityscapes|soundscapes, impressions of man’s urban ‘second nature.’ In a similar vein, his Holidays Symphony, according to Ives, paints “pictures in music of common events in the lives of common people” (Memos 97- 8), and his hymns “represent the sternness and strength and austerity of the Puritan character” (Memos 39). With Ives transferring the Emersonian Transcendentalism’s ‘correspondence’ of spirit and nature to the realm of music, 3 his ‘weather of music’ always coagulates into a representation, that is, a sonic picture of the weather - e.g. in the Holidays Symphony to an acoustic “picture of the dismal, bleak, cold weather of a February night near Fairfield” (Memos 96), with the weather itself in turn “reflecting the sternness of the Puritan’s fibre” (Memos 96n1). Thus, even if Ives explicitly refers to Thoreau, his relation to Thoreau, with all of Ives’s interest in experimental soundscapes, is a one-sided and single-minded affair at most. For Ives, listener and composer are aural equivalents to Emerson’s almighty and visual me - like with Emerson, music for Ives is not only “purely a symbol of a mental concept” (“Correspondence” 115), 4 but the almost mystical revelation of the Emersonian Over-Soul, with the composer’s role matching the one of Emerson’s Poet: For Poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings […]. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. (“The Poet” 449) Like Emerson, Ives stresses the need for representation and translation of those “primal warblings,” since he, notwithstanding his acceptance of ‘sounds,’ always emphasizes the need of a ‘subjective corrective’ to bring out|about the sounds’ “ethereal quality” (“Music and Its Future” 192). For Thoreau, however, the ‘music of nature’ needs and requires no translation: “This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains” (Journal II: 307). Thoreau lets the sounds rest and dwell in their semantic indeterminacy, focusing on “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” (Walden 11) instead. Ives, in privileging the ‘idea’ over the ‘senses,’ does ultimately not follow Thoreau in his deviation from [and maybe even re-conceptualization of] Emerson’s idealistic Tran- 3 For the theory of correspondence, see e.g. Emerson’s “Nature.” 4 See also: “‘the music’ as being the character of the idea or spirit, quite apart from its embodiment in sound” (John Kirkpatrick’s footnote in Ives’s Memos 242). A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 251 scendentalism, and is thus closer to Emerson than to Thoreau. 5 However, when Ives takes over from Thoreau the development of a conception of art that is indifferent to the source of its materials, and also to more traditional aspects of form, he begins a turn in music that proceeded to become an aesthetic dictum with avant-gardists such as John Cage. John Cage - The ‘Weather of Music’ as Mapping “[I]s not all music program music? Is not […] music […] representative in its essence? ” (Essays 4). Cage would have definitively answered Ives’s rhetorical question with a firm ‘No! ’ Cage deviates from Ives in that he precisely puts Thoreau’s shift of emphasis towards nature’s materiality center stage in his own aesthetics. Cage came across Thoreau’s Journals for the first time in 1967, and from that point made Thoreau not only the addressee of numerous compositions, but his ‘[retroactive] muse: ’ “Reading Thoreau’s Journal, I discover any idea I’ve ever had worth its salt” (“Diary” 18). One of the challenging ideas that Cage saw already prefigured in Thoreau is a non-dualistic conception of the world that counters Emerson’s doctrine of the ‘metaphoricity of nature’ and the ‘partitioning of the world’ into Me and not-me with a fundamental co-existence of both spheres - according to Thoreau, “[a]ll beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity” (Journal I: 340). Beauty [and music] for Thoreau and Cage are explicitly not Hegel’s “idea made real in the sensuous” (284) - whereas Emerson and Ives would certainly have embraced the Hegelian concept. Nature, for Thoreau and Cage, is not a function of the idea, perceptions are not interpretations of the world, but part of that world. This notion completely contradicts both the Idealism inherent to Emerson’s Transcendentalism and its claim that the subject imposes its power on matter. If Emerson claims that “the poet conforms things to his thoughts […] and impresses his being thereon” (“Nature” 34), that the creative subject in-forms matter in the first place, then for Thoreau, in contrast, “[t]he earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit” (Journal II: 165). With regard to the “telegraph harp” being ‘played’ by the weather, the resulting music of which he claimed to be “the most glorious music I ever heard” (Journal III: 219), Thoreau states: “the finest uses of things are accidental. Mr. Morse did not invent this music” (Journal III: 220). 6 Cage finds in Thoreau thus both the focus on materiality of nature, 5 Betty E. Chmaj calls Ives the “Emerson of American music” (396). On the relation Ives|Emerson, see also Shultis. 6 Thoreau goes even further and envisions the co-existence of the telegraph harp with the greater cycle of nature: “What must the birds and beasts think where it passes through woods, who heard only the squeaking of trees before! I should think that these strains would get into their music at last. Will not the mockingbird be heard one day inserting this strain in his medley? ” (Journal III: 219). There is a loud and clear ‘Yes! ’ to Thoreau’s B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 252 which Ives still had ‘subjectified’ into human and symbolic music, and the accidental, which Ives always had attempted to control. It is exactly these parameters that Cage turns into the center of his compositions. Against the traditional composer’s attempt at control - or: authorial intention - Cage envisions “a composing of sounds within a universe predicated upon the sounds themselves rather than the mind which can envisage their coming into being” (Silence 27-8). In his absolute reduction of ‘subjective control’ and his valorization of ‘sound’ Cage combines two other maxims of Thoreau: “the music is not in the tune; it is in the sound” (Journal IV: 144), and “[t]he peculiarity of a work of genius is the absence of the speaker from his speech. He is but the medium” (Journal III: 236). The radical difference in Ives’s and Cage’s reference to Thoreau can be illustrated by recourse to a passage from Walden: Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable […]. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. (Walden 123) Ives repeatedly quotes this passage and always emphasizes the ‘spiritualizing effect’ of the sound described by Thoreau - the symbolic meaning of the distant church bells, a “transcendental tune” (Essays 69), a mere echo of a more divine ‘sphere music.’ Cage, in contrast, combines Thoreau’s ‘auditory observation’ with his remark of the accidental Aeolian music of the telegraph harp. This merging of sound and indeterminacy becomes his “Music for Carillon,” a composition for chimes, for which Cage ‘translates’ nature ‘without metaphor,’ by transferring the natural patterns of the wood’s grain into musical notation. By drawing stave-lines onto the wood, Cage lets the musician ‘read’ the knotholes and grain patterns as notes - in a similar way, in “Music for Piano,” Cage uses the material irregularities of a sheet of paper to determine the position of notes. Thoreau’s preference for sounds and for the accidental makes him a progenitor of a decidedly avant-garde musical practice in Cage’s eyes, a practice which does away with the individual as locus and agency of control. This also means that this aesthetics does not deal with the representation of affectations and sensations anymore, but with the reproduction of the dynamics of natural processes. Thus Cage does not only state the importance of sounds [and silence] for him as a composer, but claims much more fundamentally: “the function of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation” (Silence 194). Here, I argue, music becomes ‘meteorological,’ since nature operates according to extremely complex dynamics, probabilities and improbabilities - just like the weather! What is fascinating about the weather is not just the power of its atmospheric special effects, the combined LucasArts™ of thunder and lightning, but more so the fact that the weather is a highly complex, dynamic, open, and thus in the long run unpredictable and question - today’s birds have integrated radio jingles and cell phone ring tones in their song. A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 253 uncontrollable system of forces and intensities. For Cage’s aesthetics and compositional practice, this means that they reveal a line of flight, a vector “away from ideas of order towards no ideas of order” (Silence 20), with the stress being on ideas of order, that is, a mental order as against a ‘natural order’ with its own ‘manners of operation.’ Against the Emersonian stress on the representation [and control] of nature by the individual, Thoreau and Cage emphasize perception as a practice [of both art and life]. According to Chris Shultis, Cage and Ives posit “the two poles of self ([…] the coexisting and controlling) in American experimental music, connecting contemporary concerns to a nineteenth-century past” (xviii), two poles already prefigured in Thoreau and Emerson. The compositional complexity of Ives’s work is due to an intertextual interweaving of ‘samples of culture’ that are ultimately [re]inscribed in a higher [transcendent] unity. David Nicholls has poignantly referred to it as an “organized chaos” (67). For Cage, it is a “purposeless play” that is [at] the ‘heart’ of life and art: This play […] is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord. (Silence 12) It is that attitude in Thoreau to “the very life we’re living” that makes him such an inspiration for Cage: “Thoreau only wanted one thing: to see and hear the world around him […]. [H]e lets things speak and write as they are” (For the Birds 233-4). Instead of ‘painting’ symbolic sonic pictures, Cage’s compositions rather construct maps and charts, that is, topographies of natural processes. It is thus more than a coincidence that the motif|motive of the map is so important in Cage’s work - see on the one hand his many compositions based on atlases or celestial charts, such as Atlas Eclipticalis, or the Etudes Australes and the Etudes Boreales, and on the other hand Cage’s various graphic notations. Cage’s mapping of the ‘weather of music’ finds its maybe most direct and ‘literal’ reflection|precipitation in his Lecture on the Weather. In this composition, passages from Thoreau’s journals (determined by chance operations) read simultaneously by various speakers in tempi of their own choice, and field recordings of wind, rain, and thunder condensate into a commentary on the political climate of the USA in the mid-1970s. In a performance of Lecture on the Weather at the Cage-Fest in Strathmore, Maryland, on May 5, 1989, doors were open to the outside where a storm began to be audible and visible […]. [T]his had the interesting effect of eradicating the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' - the meteorological display over Strathmore Hall was continuous with what was going on in the room where Cage's more gentle storm included the weather of predetermined and coincidental conjunctions of sound and voice variables. (Retallack 248) The performance in fact “is not about weather; it is weather” (Perloff 25). B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 254 Cage’s ‘weather of music’ thus can be understood as an assemblage of sonic intensities and natural processes - the compositions become meteorological systems themselves. These systems, however, are, as Cage himself admits and regrets, still ‘framed’ - even silence has the precise temporal coordinates of 4: 33. And this is one of the decisive differences between Cage and the sound installations of John Luther Adams that I will focus on now, installations that aim at reproducing the ‘weather of music’ as a dynamic ecosystem. John Luther Adams - The ‘Weather of Music’ as Ecosystem As Gigliola Nocera has emphasized, the living and working conditions of Ives and Cage were comparable to Thoreau’s isolation at Walden Pond. Ives was working far off the ‘art centers’ in Danbury, Connecticut, and Cage in Stony Point, in New York State (see Nocera 356). Isolation is an even bigger issue with the composer John Luther Adams, 7 who lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska, approx. 125 miles south of the Arctic. Adams’s work is highly influenced by his environment - from his early works onwards he has always pointed out that he wants his music to be understood as an interaction with nature, as a site-specific “contact” with the environment that he calls “sonic geography” (“Resonance of Place” 8). Adams’s sonic geography includes a cycle called songbirdsongs (1974- 1980), consisting of various imitations of Alaskan birds reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogues d’oiseaux. Although in the compositional process and the transcription Adams brings birdsong to a ‘human scale’ in terms of tempo, modulation, pitch, etc., he conceptualizes the different melodies as a ‘toolkit,’ so that during the performance, an ever-new aggregation of phrases and motifs comes into existence, an open system, indeterminate in combination, length, intonation, tempi, etc. Earth and the Great Weather (1990-1993), an evening-long piece - or opera - consisting of field recordings of wind, melting glaciers, and thunder in combination with ritual drumming and chants of the Alaskan indigenous people, was “conceived as a journey through the physical, cultural and spiritual landscapes of the Arctic” (“Sonic Geography”). In a further step, Adams combined his ‘sonic geography’ with the concept of what he calls” sonic geometry” (“Strange and Sacred Noise” 143). Adams is more and more interested in the ‘noisier’ sounds of nature and refers to findings of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in order to find sonic equivalents for nature’s modus operandi. Strange and Sacred Noise (1991-1997) is an example of this approach. 8 7 Adams, it has to be noted, is also an environmental activist and founder of Alaska’s Green Party. Mitchell Morris thus dubs Adams a “‘Green’ composer” (131). 8 Strange and Sacred Noise is a concert-length cycle of six movements for percussion quartet. Its first and last movements (“[…] dust into dust […]” and “[…] and dust rising A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 255 To date, the culmination of Adams’s sonic geography|geometry has been his recent project The Place Where You Go To Listen, the title of which refers to an Inuit legend according to which the shamans hear the wisdom of the world in [and get their knowledge from] the whisper of the wind and the murmur of the waves. Adams aims at the realization of a “musical ecosystem […]. A work of art […] that is directly connected to the real world in which we live and resonates sympathetically with that world and with the forces of nature” (Mayer “Northern Exposure”). Adams not only imitates nature in its manner of operation, as Cage does, he taps into nature’s dynamic processes themselves for the generation of sound and light. Adams developed this project in close collaboration with geologists and physicists - in this installation, real time data from meteorological stations all over Alaska and from the five stations of the Alaska Earthquake Information Center are collected, coordinated, and made audible through pink noise filters. As Curt Szuberla, one of the physicists involved in the project, explains, “[t]he strings and bells and drumheads are plucked, bashed and banged based on the geophysical data streams. And the geophysical data streams […] are the fingers and mallets and bells that hit things and make things sound” (Mayer Living on Earth). The Place Where You Go To Listen is a permanent installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, where sound and light are generated in real time through data processing of the day and night rhythms, the rhythm of the seasons, of the moon phases, the weather conditions, and the seismic flows of the magnetic field of the Earth - nature itself, as well as the music it produces, operates according to its own times and speeds [and slownesses]. Hours, even days [and more] might pass between perceivable seismic changes or changes in the magnetic field of the Earth. The Place Where You Go To Listen focuses on nature as process and event - in an almost Stoic emphasis on becoming versus being, Adams privileges timesensitive dynamics, not clear-cut states. Adams’s installation goes further in the direction of the event than Ives and even Cage - although these two composers had also already pondered the conflict between the processuality of nature, and the means of art. Ives asked himself: […]”) are based on the Cantor set and Cantor dust (the two-dimensional version of the Cantor set). These fractals model the behavior of electrical noise, which Adams takes as a diagram for the percussion set to explore “the dynamic form of the Cantor dust, whereby in an infinite process, line segments are divided into two segments by the removal of their middle third” (Feisst, “Music as Place”). See also (Feisst “Klanggeographie - Klanggeometrie”). B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 256 A painter paints a sunset - can he paint the setting sun? […] [Is] [t]here […] an analogy […] between both the state and power of artistic perceptions and the law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream, partly biological, partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature, in all life? (Essays 71) Ives tried to master this problematics by way of the ever increasing complexification of his compositorial means. Cage also emphasized that he did not think it correct to say ‘the world as it is’: it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change […], it is more mobile than you can imagine. You’re getting closer to this reality when you say as it ‘presents itself; ’ that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process. (For the Birds 80) But - Ives was still the subject in control of chaos, and Cage, in spite of all indeterminacy, regretted that he was still creating ‘clear-cut’ objects. Adams solves this problem by leaving the executing|processing energy to the processual forces of nature itself. Music and environment thus become an ecosystem of a dynamics of acoustic and optic resonances interacting in|with an environment in constant flux. ‘Music’ in this sense thus for Adams becomes something entirely different than a ‘means’ of human communication about an external world: If music grounded in tone is a means of sending messages to the world, then music grounded in noise is a means of receiving messages from the world. […] As we listen carefully to noise, the whole world becomes music. Rather than a vehicle for self-expression, music becomes a mode of awareness. (“Ecology of Music”) Thus, The Place Where You Go To Listen leaves the conceptualization of a music about nature, of music as a means of the representation of nature and landscape, on which e.g. Ives still relied, and creates music as a part of nature, as coextensive with the environment: “Through attentive and sustained listening to the resonances of this place, I hope to make music which belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds” (Adams “Resonance of Place” 8). Even more direct than Cage, Adams emphasizes nature’s “manner of operation” in not only taking them as a model, but by directly ‘accessing’ and relating to the becoming of a site-specific environment and creating works that are this relation - a music of place, of a place where you go to listen. Adams explicitly refers to Thoreau in his work Thoreau was a tremendous source of inspiration for me. […] There is a certain aspiration to transcendence in my work. But, as with Thoreau, it’s a transcendence that rises not from religion, rather from deep within the Earth. (email correspondence) Adams is clearly indebted to Thoreau’s sound aesthetics even more so, I argue, than Ives’s or even Cage’s work. Like for Thoreau, for Adams music already is part of the environment. Nature has no need to be translated or represented, nature and the environment already sound, already express themselves. In Walden, Thoreau writes that “making the yellow soil express its A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 257 summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass - this was my daily work” (Walden 157). If Thoreau calls this ‘natural expression’ by the name of “saying,” he is evoking a correspondence between ‘expression’ and the ‘production’ of nature - a correspondence that goes far beyond the level of representation. The ‘expression’ of nature on the side of ‘production’ arrives in the subject as an ‘impression,’ so that from the perspective of culture, what we call representation is already rooted in nature - “every word is rooted in the soil, is indeed flowery and verdurous” (Thoreau, Journal I: 386). “A history of music would be like […] the history of gravitation” - with regard to Adams’s physico-musical ecosystem, this sentence perfectly makes sense as a postmodern credo of New Music. However, this sentence is Thoreau’s (Journal I: 325) - and here we have come full circle, to Walden Pond, where more than 150 years ago, Thoreau was hearing an ecology of music, that only today is being realized. 9 9 A different version of this essay has been published as “The ‘Weather of Music: ’ Sounding Nature in the 20 th and 21 st Centuries.” Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 216-32. B ERND H ERZOGENRATH 258 Works Cited Adams, John Luther. “Resonance of Place.” The North American Review CCLXXIX: 1 (Jan/ Feb 1994): 8-18. ---. “Sonic Geography of the Arctic. An Interview with Gayle Young.” Musicworks 70 (Spring 1998): 28 May 2010 <http: / / www.johnlutheradams.com/ interview/ gayle young.html> ---. “Strange and Sacred Noise.” Yearbook of Soundscape Studies. Vol. 1: “Northern Soundscapes.” Eds. R. Murray Schafer and Helmi Järviluoma. Tampere 1998. 143-46. ---. “In Search of an Ecology of Music.” (2006) 28 May 2010 <http: / / www.john lutheradams.com/ writings/ ecology.html> Cage, John. “Diary.” M: Writings ’67-’72. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan UP, 1969. 3-25. ---. Silence. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan UP, 1973. ---. For the Birds. John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston and London: Marion Boyars, 1981. Chmaj, Betty E.. “The Journey and the Mirror: Emerson and the American Arts.” Prospects 10 (1985): 353-408. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essay and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 5-49. ---. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 445-68. ---. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 Vols. Eds. William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960-83. Feisst, Sabine M. “Klanggeographie - Klanggeometrie. Der US-amerikanische Komponist John Luther Adams.” MusikTexte 91 (November 2001): 4-14. ---. “Music as Place, Place as Music. The Sonic Geography of John Luther Adams.” (unpublished manuscript). Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I. Trans T.M. Know. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Ives, Charles. Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. Ed. Howard Boatwright. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. ---. Memos. Ed. John Kirkpatrick. London: Calder & Boyars, 1973. ---. “Music and Its Future.” American Composers on American Music. A Symposium. Ed. Henry Cowell. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1933. 191-98. ---. “Correspondence with Clifton Joseph Furness, July 24 1923.” Ives Collection, Yale University. Mayer, Amy. “Northern Exposure: A museum exhibit converts activity in the Alaskan environment into an ever changing sound show.” Boston Globe April 16, 2006, n.p. ---. Living On Earth. Radio Interview with Curt Szuberla et. al., 28 March 2009 <www.loe.org/ shows/ segments.htm? programID=06-P13-00016&segmentID=5> Mehring, Frank. Sphere Melodies. Die Manifestation transzendentalistischen Gedankenguts in der Musik der Avantgardisten Charles Ives und John Cage. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003. Morris, Mitchell. “Ectopian Sound, or The Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism.” Crosscurrents and Counterpoints. Eds. Per F. Broman et al. Göteborg: 1998. 129-41. Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. A ‘Meteorology of Sound’ 259 Nocera, Gigliola. “Henry David Thoreau et le neo-transcendentalisme de John Cage.” Revue d’Estetique (1987-8): 351-69. Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice. Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991. Retallack, Joan. “Poethics of a Complex Realism.” John Cage: Composed in America. Eds. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junckerman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 242-73. Schulz, Dieter. Amerikanischer Transzendentalismus: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Shultis, Chris. Silencing the Sounding Self. John Cage and the Experimental Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Music. Boston: 1998. Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Eds. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. In Fourteen Volumes (bound as two). New York: Dover Publications, 1962. ---. The Illustrated Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. ---. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. M ICHAEL S AUTER “How do I get out? ” - Transcultural Places as Sanctuary in The Human Stain 1 Introduction Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain is the final installment of his “America Trilogy”. It is expansive in its focus, covering a wide spectrum of contemporary topics. The following examination of the role of transcultural places in the novel draws on Hubert Zapf’s concept of “Literature as Cultural Ecology” as an interpretive framework. This introduction is followed by an outline of Zapf’s triadic model and an analysis of the novel which concentrates on transcultural aspects and aims to integrate the analytical concept of place with a cultural-ecological reading. The opening paragraph of the novel firmly anchors the narrative in the summer of 1998 and introduces a central plot element, the affair between a cleaning woman, Faunia Farley, and a professor of classics, Coleman Silk. The focus then turns to the place where this affair began, [a] rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town. (1) This description taps into American cultural memory, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but also situates the narrative in a decidedly physical American context, or better, space. Referring to the concept of the small town with its typical elements like the “gas station”, the “general store,” not to mention the “American flag,” the initial setting and the space in which most of the action will take place is deftly delineated. At the same time, the remoteness of this “commercial center” is evidenced in the fact that it is a mere “crossroads” in a “mountainside town”. As a number of critics have pointed out, the characters who interact in this space all go through some kind of identity crisis (cf. Kral). These crises, I would argue, can be better understood if one looks at the spatial concepts underlying the structure of the novel. Interestingly, the majority of the novel’s main characters can be shown to transcend or fluctuate between different cultural spaces. In the following, Hubert Zapf’s conception of Literature as Cultural Ecology will serve as an interpretive framework. According to Zapf, M ICHAEL S AUTER 262 Literature has always been the medium of a ‘cultural ecology’ in the sense that it has staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the relationship of prevailing cultural systems to the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman ‘nature’. (Zapf, “Remarks” 3) In this view, the study of place in literature is especially promising as it provides a particularly useful concept well-suited for an analysis of the interactions between human and non-human ‘nature.’ Place is both a social construct and a part of the natural world. (Buell, Writing 60) A similar point is made by Carter, Donald, and Squires, who define place as “space to which meaning has been ascribed” (qtd. in Buell, Future 63). Two places in the novel will be analyzed with special attention to the way they influence identity-formation: the Audubon Society at Seeley Falls which is instrumental for the concept of identity developed by Faunia Farley and the urban space of New York City’s Greenwich Village - the environment in which Coleman Silk leaves behind his African-American roots and creates his new Jewish self. 2 Literature as Cultural Ecology The notion of “Literature as Cultural Ecology” as put forward by Zapf draws on the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser on the one hand, and new developments in ecocriticism on the other hand, in particular Peter Finke’s project of an “Evolutionary Cultural Ecology,” which builds on a tradition of ecological thinking in cultural contexts starting with Julian Steward, and later elaborated by Gregory Bateson and others: “It explains culture as an ecosystematically organized product of overall evolutionary processes. Therefore, the core of the new approach consists of a theory of so-called cultural ecosystems” (Finke 175). Zapf’s adaptation of this concept to literature is guided by the thesis that imaginative literature in particular “acts like an ecological principle or an ecological energy within the larger system of cultural discourses.” (Zapf, “State” 55) In this view, literature has two main functions. Firstly, it serves as a source of cultural creativity and in this way constantly renews language, perception and communication. Secondly, literature serves as a diagnostic sensorium by pointing out deficits and short-comings of the cultural system. Literature can be characterized by analogies between aesthetic and ecological processes. For one, Zapf sees literature as a depragmatized sphere in which the first ecological principle “Everything is connected to everything else” becomes a structuring feature of texts. Further characteristics of both aesthetic and ecological processes include their processual and relational nature, as well as their complexity. For the analysis of literary works Zapf proposes a triadic functional model of literature as “cultural-critical metadiscourse,” “imaginative counterdiscourse,” and “reintegrative interdiscourse.” As a cultural-critical meta- “How do I get out? ” 263 discourse, literature functions as a “representation of typical deficits, blind spots, imbalances, deformations, and contradictions within dominant systems of civilizatory power” (Zapf, “State” 62). Such systems prevent the individual from developing freely and force them to comply with authoritative sets of rules. As a consequence the diversity of life is reduced and streamlined to ideologically determined models of development and conduct. The conflicts and traumas which arise from such oppression lead to a variety of severe consequences for the individual, which are often symbolically expressed in literature through images like death-in-life, the waste land or animal-in-the-cage (cf. Zapf 64). To cite one of Zapf’s examples, the beginning of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with its bleak description of puritan society, and its description of a prison can be seen as constituting a (part of the) cultural-critical metadiscourse. The imaginative counterdiscourse “can be described as a counterdiscursive staging and semiotic empowering of that which is marginalized, neglected or repressed in the dominant cultural reality system” (Zapf, “State” 63). This empowering of the formerly excluded leads to confrontation with neglected questions and thus undermines dominant structures. In a monolithic and restrictive system, the return of the marginalized offers alternatives and a wider context for reassessments of the system. The “other” is also the source of creativity for the production of literature - the formerly marginalized becomes aesthetically marked. (cf. Zapf 65) An example of this complex process is the scarlet letter on Hester’s breast, which becomes the symbol of the culturally repressed, as well as the starting point for a semiosis which puts the letter in a wide range of different contexts, transcending the originally intended meaning “adulteress”. Finally, the reintegrative interdiscourse “can be described as the reintegration of the excluded with the cultural reality system, through which literature contributes to the constant renewal of the cultural center from its margins.” (Zapf, “State” 64) This reintegration does not just offer simple solutions, but points to alternatives. Literature draws its emotional and cognitive intensity from the combination of formerly disparate spheres, among which culture and nature are the most basic. The reintegration of the repressed with the dominant system leads to moments of regeneration and a regaining of lost creativity. The end of a death-in-life state is often translated into imagery of new beginnings and rebirth. In The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale’s burst of creativity after the reunion with Hester and Pearl in the forest (cf. Zapf 82) can be analyzed as part of the reintegrative interdiscourse. These discourses are constituted in the metaphoric language and the imagery of the text: their distribution in any literary work must necessarily be specific to the respective texts. Different genres may vary in their emphasis on one of the three discourses and in different periods, one or the other discourse may become predominant. Zapf asserts that, in principle, all three discourses are inherent to literature, which in this way fulfils an important function within the ecology of a wider culture. M ICHAEL S AUTER 264 3 Philip Roth’s The Human Stain Philip Roth is hardly known for nature writing or the ecological focus of his novels, but a survey of his major texts shows that a closer examination from an ecocritical perspective might yield interesting results. It is worth considering for a moment to what extent the classical theme of city and countryside - as discussed in the studies by Leo Marx and Raymond Williams - can be found in Roth’s works. In the majority of Roth’s novel the urban centre is Newark, New Jersey. In his first novella Goodbye, Columbus the green and affluent suburb of Short Hills serves as contrast to downtown Newark, where the protagonist Neil Klugman hopes that Brenda Patimkin, who lives in Short Hills will help him climb the “lousy hundred and eighty feet” (Goodbye, Columbus 18) of physical altitude and socio-economic status that lie between Newark and its wealthy suburb. Later, Roth thematized this tension between city and suburb in American Pastoral: the protagonist Seymour “Swede” Levov moves to Rimrock when Newark goes into decline. In suburban Rimrock Levov enacts his pastoral fantasy, living in a house dating back to the American Revolution and feeling like Johnny Appleseed. (cf. 315) This dynamic continues with Marcus Messner, the protagonist of Roth’s latest novel Indignation, who escapes his over-protective father and leaves Newark to continue his education at Winesburg College, Ohio, which of evokes Sherwood Anderson’s eponymous book and its descriptions of rural small-town life. The Human Stain can be added to this list for a variety of reasons: Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist and narrator, is well known from a series of earlier novels and is probably the most prominent literary recluse in contemporary American literature. From The Ghost Writer in 1979, where he visited his idol I.E. Lonoff on a secluded mountaintop to his latest, probably final appearance in Exit Ghost, Zuckerman has been oscillating between participating in the stream of life and isolation from it. The very first sentence of Exit Ghost draws attention to this oscillation: “I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years” (1). The different spaces of New York City, Newark and the Berkshires are an important part of the last Zuckerman novel, yet The Human Stain goes further in the treatment of ecological themes than Roth’s other works. The novel’s title, “The Human Stain,” has a number of possible meanings, among them the tainting of a pristine natural state through human and cultural interference. Seen in this light, passages like the ending of the novel with its pastoral imagery become problematic: Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America (361). “How do I get out? ” 265 While the image of water “constantly turning over” is striking in its harmony, the tableau is not devoid of irony: the solitary man in the tableau is Lester Farley, a psychopath and supposed murderer, in some sense a personification of the “human stain.” At a closer look, it becomes clear that The Human Stain might be considered, if not a transcultural novel, at least transcultural in focus. As will be shown below, the novel is concerned with the construction of identity across different forms of culture, e.g. African-American and Jewish-American or French vs. American. Furthermore we can consider the novel a hybrid in form and content, a mix of different genres closely associated with the heyday of various cultures: it is primarily a novel, but as critics like Mark Shechner have pointed out, The Human Stain could pass perfectly as a Hawthornian Romance, a decidedly American genre, while it is structurally reminiscent of Greek tragedy with its five parts. Preceded by an epigraph from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and containing chapter headings like “The Purifying Ritual,” these analogies cannot be overlooked. They are supported by a large amount of intertextual references to Greek but also to Shakespearian Tragedy, adding another layer of cultural reference To pick just one specific reference, the names of characters are drawn from Roman and Greek mythology and tragedy, while the plays of Shakespeare, especially Julius Caesar serve as an intermediary: there is Coleman “Brutus,” and Ernestine “Calpurnia” Silk. Faunia Farley and even less important figures have names like “Primus” and Vietnam veteran Lester, or “Les” Farley is brought into connection with Achilles. Another transcultural element in the novel is its setting in academia. The college that employs Silk is called Athena, yet it is far from a place of enlightenment in the classical sense. Among its faculty we find Delphine Roux, a young French professor of literature, whose education at the École Normale Supérieure and Yale turns out to be a mixed blessing: while it boosted her application, it also sets her apart from her colleagues and she feels out of place at Athena. She thinks of herself as “a displaced person, a misplaced person.” (276) What resonates in the term “displaced” is that she tries to step out of the shadow of her overpowering family and basically flees France only to realize, that she does not belong in American society, that cultural integration takes more than just mastering the language. She comes to recognize that despite “all her fluency she is not fluent” (275). This culture shock also comes in the form of a clash of academic “cultures”. Her proficiency in French theory does not fare well with the settled “humanists,” her colleagues in the department, who make fun of her “little French aura” (271). She is not the only character trying to construct an identity between and across cultures: Coleman Silk, the protagonist, does so in a much more dramatic way. Famously, The Human Stain is a novel about the phenomenon of passing and about negotiating life in different cultures: Coleman Silk is born into an African-American family and realizes as a teenager that his light skin allows him to pass as white. He renounces his family, takes on a Jewish identity and M ICHAEL S AUTER 266 becomes a Professor of Classics at Athena College. Eventually, he has to resign in the wake of allegations of racism by African-American students. The irony here is that Silk decided to pass as white to avoid the impact of racism in the first place. However, the decision to distance himself from his family generates new constraints, such as having to lie to his wife and children. The initial sense of triumph about the fact that “[a]s a heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables, he now made sense” (132) soon gives way to the realization that his new identity comes at the price of isolation and fear of being found out. Only after the death of his wife and in a new relationship to a cleaning woman does he find a way to break out of this situation, which by now amounts to a death-in-life state. The Human Stain, as a novel, centers on the identity crises of its protagonists. Using the triadic model, we can roughly say that the cultural-critical metadiscourse of the novel with its main themes of racism and extreme forms of individualism and political correctness informs much of Coleman’s life, his youth and the time of his passing at Athena College. After the scandal leading to his resignation, Silk experiences a rebirth of sorts in a passionate love affair with Faunia Farley, who is part of the imaginative counterdiscourse of the novel. Throughout she is closely associated with the natural sphere (as evidenced in her first name) and subverts societal categories, for example by pretending to be illiterate. As a consequence, she is able to accept Coleman Silk, who, like her, often lives beyond conventions of society. Finally, the reintegrative interdiscourse in the novel cannot be separated from the character of Nathan Zuckerman. As the narrator figure of the novel, he is in control of narration and much of the novel is actually his conjecture about the inner life of the other protagonists. Zuckerman, who had languished in the Berkshires following prostate surgery benefits from the positive energies of Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley. The rebirth of Coleman Silk is followed by the rebirth of his friend Nathan Zuckerman, as he himself points out: “Coleman danced me right back to life” (45). The two develop a deep friendship which leads Zuckerman to research the circumstances of Silk’s death and publish “Spooks” - essentially a diegetic version of The Human Stain - in order to defend the reputation of his friend. In this way, the genesis of the novel, as explained on the diegetic level, can be traced to the invigorating influence of Coleman and Faunia on Nathan Zuckerman. This is the structuring device of the novel, in which imaginative counterdiscourse and cultural-critical metadiscourse are brought together, contrasted and finally reintegrated. 4 Transcultural Places as Sanctuaries As can be seen in the examples of Delphine Roux and Coleman Silk, the identity crises in Roth’s novel can be traced to the difficulties of preserving identity across and between cultures. For Coleman Silk, one place in particular is “How do I get out? ” 267 central to his constructions of selfhood: between his childhood days in Newark and his new existence as the first Jewish professor at Athena College, Silk lives in New York City’s Greenwich Village. This place plays an important role in the formative years of the protagonist for a variety of reasons: removed from his family in Newark, Silk is no longer determined by family ties and the socially progressive environment offers many possibilities for expressions of his individuality. Since one dominant element of the culturalcritical metadiscourse in the novel is racism, one can argue that the negative effects of racism ultimately lead Coleman to renounce his African-American family and to pass as white. At this time of his life Silk enjoys the fact that his identity can be fluid, that he can decide whether he wants to be perceived as African American or as Jewish; he enjoys “the sliding relationship with everything” (108), as he terms it. The importance of the spatial separation from his Newark roots can be observed when Silk takes his white girlfriend Steena Palson to Newark in order to introduce her to his family. He had avoided telling her that he is passing as white and consequently the encounter is experienced as shocking both by Silk’s family and his girlfriend. The atmosphere is tense, but the catastrophic outcome of the meeting becomes clear only at the end of the commute back to New York: “Not until the train carrying Coleman and Steena back to New York pulled into Pennsylvania Station early that evening did Steena break down in tears” (125). This traumatic experience eventually leads Silk to denounce his family and to start a new one with his Jewish wife Iris Gittelman. Before these events lead to tragic complications at Athena College, Silk enters a phase of playful experimentation when he meets a new girlfriend, Ellie Magee. She discovers the secret of his passing and as a result he can open himself up to her in ways he could not to Steena Palson. Both enjoy the fact they are often perceived as a mixed-race couple, even “playing the ambiguity of it” (133). Silk particularly enjoys the theatricality of this relationship, and the fact that “he’s always in a scene when he’s out with Ellie”(133). For a while he relishes life in “the four freest square miles in America” (135), as Ellie calls the Village. However, the appeal of a playful, fluid identity does not prove as strong as the yearning for singularity and a stable form of identity. Therefore, when he finally decides to permanently take on a Jewish identity, his new wife “Iris gives him back his life on the scale he wants to live it”(136). Soon he realizes that the new identity holds its own set of limitations. The births of his children always carry the threat of crisis as no one can guarantee his children will share his light complexion. Upholding his new identity in all circumstances puts a high strain on him and leaves him burned out at the end of his career, languishing in a death-in-life state. In summary, Silk is ultimately looking to accomplish a greater feat than merely changing between two different ethnic identities at will. In a series of scenes the novel shows the problematic side of his decision to pass as white. With an ambition that is reminiscent of tragic hubris Coleman Silk seeks ever greater challeng- M ICHAEL S AUTER 268 es, first passing as white, then settling for a Jewish identity and eventually becoming the first Jewish professor at Athena College. His position at Athena seems an antithesis to both, his origins in Newark and his student years in Manhattan. If we turn our attention to an equally important place in the novel, the rooms of the Audubon Society at Seeley Falls, we can see that despite all the apparent differences to Greenwich Village this place serves a similar function in so far as a central character uses it to redefine her identity. The place is far removed from the bustling life of the metropolis, but its quiet and meditative atmosphere even set it apart from the small-town life at Athena College. In this environment Faunia Farley finds refuge when she is most depressed and here the concept of the “human stain,” which gives the novel its title, is developed. Faunia Farley, who has an invigorating effect on Coleman Silk, often visits this place to deal with her severe depressions and begins to develop a relationship with the birds that are kept there in cages. The most prominent of these birds is a crow named Prince, who shows anthropomorphic character traits acquired in the process of being handraised. By identifying with this crow and talking with it, Faunia leaves her outsider’s existence by acknowledging her marginal status in the society of Athena and adopts a new model of identity. Just like her, the crow can be considered an outsider as it is not accepted by other crows. An employee at the Audubon Society states: “He doesn’t have the right voice. He doesn’t know the crow language. They don’t like him out there” (242). Faunia Farley comments, “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain” (242). By affiliating herself with the crow, Faunia stresses her affinity to natural processes and adopts a hybrid identity bridging the spheres of culture and nature. Faunia visits the crow at times of great distress and finds comfort and companionship at the Audubon Society. This seems to touch upon a theme outlined by Benesch: “space in modern literature […] often functions as a site of aesthetic relief and regeneration” (13). As Lawrence Buell points out in The Future of Ecocriticism, nature can have a therapeutic function: “one can even speak plausibly of finding a place or ‘home’ in ‘wilderness’ - as a therapeutic refuge, for example” (67). Faunia’s case mirrors this motif, but is different in so far as the Audubon Society cannot be called a wilderness. Buell notes the example of Douglas Peacock’s Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, which presents an account of the author’s efforts to come to terms with the trauma he suffered in the Vietnam War. Peacock felt numb and isolated after his return to America, struggling with the after-effects of his deployment: “If something wasn’t a matter of life or death, I just wasn’t there anymore.” (25) He discovers that encounters with the few remaining Grizzly Bears in the United States enable him to feel alive again and finds a new calling in protecting these threatened animals. In a sense, the harsh environment of Grizzly country becomes a psychological necessity for him: “I decided to push on. I needed something strong enough to pull me outside myself, a “How do I get out? ” 269 good dose of wild country maybe. The Navajo or the Wind rivers might do it.” (17) Faunia Farley, who is equally traumatized, voices a similar sentiment: “Who do I talk to? Where do I go and what do I do and how the fuck do I get out? I am a crow. I know it. I know it! ” (169) While the underlying motives of escaping from depressive mental states are similar - “to pull me outside of myself” in Peacock’s case and “how the fuck do I get out” in Faunia’s - there is a big difference in the way both experience nature. While Peacock seeks out the relative wilderness of America’s national parks, Faunia finds comfort at the Audubon Society, which offers a decidedly more domesticated and culturally informed access to wildlife. The crow does not represent pristine nature, its appeal to Faunia lies in its outsider status, in its human traits. In this sense, the Audubon Society is a place, where the boundary between nature and culture is renegotiated; it is therefore a transcultural place in the widest sense. This is an important part of the imaginative counterdiscourse in the novel, as it points out alternative ways of perception and breaks down the discursive constraints of Athena College and its surroundings. 5 Conclusion This analysis, with its emphasis on only two characters and places remains merely a first step towards analyzing the spatial concept underlying The Human Stain. Its intention was to present two examples of central transcultural places in the novel and to demonstrate their relevance to its entirety. One could argue that Roth’s treatment of setting and places in particular is only ancillary to his characterizations, as George J. Searles does (cf. Searles 123), but research on space and place has always insisted on their connection to identity. Therefore, this argument should not ultimately preclude a closer scrutiny of the function of place in Roth’s works. A helpful concept for such an analysis is Buell’s understanding of an accumulative sense of place, which he describes as the notion that: “all the places a person has lived that she or he still dreams about sometimes are embedded and responsible for shaping present identity beyond what is consciously realized.” (Writing 69) In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk’s identity can be described as informed by a succession of places, ranging from his childhood in Newark to his life in Athena, with his time in Greenwich Village playing a pivotal role. Indeed both places discussed here seem transcultural in different ways. Coleman Silk thrives on the cosmopolitan and transcultural environment of New York City and Greenwich Village and explores the potential of a fluid identity in his playful passing as white. In the long run, however, his creative act of adopting a Jewish identity proves problematic to say the least. As for Faunia, it is interesting to note that she does not retreat to the absolute wilderness, but to the in-between state of the Audubon Society. The concept of the “human stain” is located on this blurry borderline: M ICHAEL S AUTER 270 Faunia’s rejection of society is both creatively therapeutic and a gesture of surrender. A comparison between these places also highlights similarities between Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley: both in their own ways try to escape “the persecuting spirit” (2) prevalent in their respective surroundings. The two places serve similar functions insofar as they provide sanctuaries from the dominant discourse the characters seek to evade. This ambivalence of the transcultural places in the novel derives from the fact that they are sites of a creative renewal which comes at a price. As such these places are part of the cultural-critical metadiscourse as well as the imaginative counterdiscourse. In The Human Stain, two characters look for ways of constructing an identity beyond the judgment of their contemporaries. One way to achieve this is offered by the urban center that allows for anonymity, fluid identities and tolerance, while the other option is the nature retreat of the Audubon Society, which invites Faunia to redefine herself in relation to her status in society as well as to her position in the environment. For all the ambivalences and challenges they pose, these liminal, transcultural places function as catalysts for the development of both the characters’ personalities and the plot, and as such should be considered absolutely central to Philip Roth’s novel. “How do I get out? ” 271 Works Cited Benesch, Klaus. “Concepts of Space in American Culture: An Introduction.” Space in America. Theory History Culture. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2005. 11-21. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World. Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. ---. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Finke, Peter. “Die evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur” Literature and Ecology. Special issue of Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 124.1 (2006): 175-217. Kral, Françoise. “F(r)ictions of Identity in The Human Stain.” Philip Roth Studies 2.1 (2006): 47-55. Peacock, Doug. Grizzly Years. In Search of the American Wilderness. New York: Holt, 1990. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. 1997. London: Vintage, 1998. ---. Exit Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ---. Goodbye Columbus. And Five Short Stories. 1959. London: Vintage, 2006. ---. The Human Stain. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001. ---. Indignation. London: Cape, 2008. Searles, George. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985. Shechner, Mark. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: The Human Stain.” Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies.” Literature and Ecology. Special issue of Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 124.1 (2006): 1-10. ---. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. ---. “The state of ecocriticism and the function of literature as cultural ecology” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 49-69. A LEXANDER S TARRE Wilderness Woes: Negotiating Discourse and Environment in Early American Captivity Narratives 1 Introduction 1 In 2002, the critic Michael Branch complained that current ecocriticism has voluntarily and unnecessarily limited its focus. He detected a drift in the pertinent academic literature toward “the nonfiction personal essay that sympathetically describes nature” (“Saving” 5) and warned that disregarding authors “because their understanding of the natural world is predicated upon ideological or aesthetic assumptions different from our own” would prove detrimental to the young critical approach (“Saving” 6). 2 Branch’s complaint might have already been obsolete at the time of its publication. In the past years, anthologies and essay collections in the field have assembled an impressive array of material on all kinds of authors and texts. 3 It seems as if the classical writers of the American ‘environmental imagination’ like Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman find themselves in an ever-enlarging community. This may be an indicator that ecocriticism is still in a phase of expansion after having gained a strong foothold thanks to the work of critics like Lawrence Buell, who recently diagnosed: “Right now, as I see it, environmental criticism is in the tense but enviable position of being a wide-open movement still sorting out its premises and its powers” (Future 28). The following reflects this expansion in a two-fold manner. I will focus on texts that have rarely been discussed in an ecocritical framework and that are often associated with a generally hostile ideological perspective on the environment. Furthermore, my area of inquiry provides a historical dimension to the current study of conceptualizations of natural space. I will mainly be concerned with two Puritan captivity narratives, namely The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc. (1736) by John Gyles. These writers were captured during a period of warfare that lasted from the late 17th until the early 18th century - most notably King Philip’s War from 1675-76. 4 1 I would like to thank Daniel Stein and Kirsten Sandrock for comments and suggestions. 2 See also Branch, “Before”, in which he outlines the same problem and provides ecocritical readings of William Wood and Cotton Mather. 3 The very volumes in which Branch’s essays were published fulfill his call for an extended focus. See Rosendale; Armbruster and Wallace. 4 The brutality and the horrific death toll of King Philip's War have been thoroughly studied. For the sake of overcoming a purely anthropocentric view of this time of war, I A LEXANDER S TARRE 274 Mary Rowlandson spent eleven weeks in captivity in 1676; John Gyles was abducted from his home in Maine in 1689 during what came to be called King Williams War. He was not able to return until 1698. These two authors were situated at different points in the social sphere of colonial New England. As the wife of a Puritan minister in the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson stands in sharp contrast to the simple farmer’s son John Gyles, who spent almost ten years in Indian 5 captivity as a young boy. Readings of these texts thus promise to reflect the captivity experience from different authorial standpoints and to yield insights into their respective perspectives on nature and space. In a first step, I will examine the Puritan wilderness discourse and the rhetorical negotiations that occur when this discourse is brought “to the touchstone of nature,” to borrow a phrase by Thomas Paine (26). The second section contains analyses of the rhetorical strategies of drawing the border between civilization and wilderness. The last part of this paper examines exemplary traces the New England environment left in the narratives. Throughout these exploratory remarks I will indicate how the study of Early American captivity narratives may benefit from a critical approach which has absorbed some of the tenets of ecocriticism - most notably by critically engaging with what Buell has called “the environmental embeddedness of human being and history” (Buell, “Green” 46). In Rowlandson’s and Gyles’s narrative accounts of captivity, we perceive the outcome of a clash between two spheres that form the central components of ecocritical exploration: human discourse and the empirical world, or - to phrase it in terms more appropriate to cultural theory - text and context. It is my contention that the New England environment shaped the captives’ narratives in multiple ways and at least to the same extent as their transcultural interaction with the Indian tribes did. While the latter topic has been amply discussed, the former is still a lacuna in scholarship with regard to captivity narratives. 2 The Puritan Wilderness Discourse Their direct relation to the place that was conceptualized in Puritan 6 intellectual discourse as the ‘wilderness’ sets the representations of natural envimostly disregard the human tragedies connected with it. An insightful account of the war's cultural roots and repercussions can be found in Lepore. 5 For the remainder of the paper, members of the Native American tribes that lived in the area of today’s New England states and Southern Canada will be called ‘Indians.’ This terminology is in keeping with the historical sources as well as with most studies of captivity narratives. 6 The term ‘Puritan’ itself has come under scrutiny in American Studies. To stress the numerous internal differences and schisms within the New England religious community, scholars have proposed alternatives such as ‘godly’ or ‘post-Puritan’ (Herget 34-35). Since the term ‘Puritan’ still dominates scholarly discourse, this paper will follow the majority usage. Wilderness Woes 275 ronments in Rowlandson’s and Gyles’s captivity narratives apart from other writings of the colonial period, such as sermons, memoirs, and poetry. Furthermore, captivity narratives were immensely popular with the yet small English-speaking American readership. 7 In New Historicist terms, it is fair to assume that due to their wide circulation, the ‘cultural work’ of these texts significantly influenced late-18th-century New Englanders’ ideas about and practices toward their environment. In order to make their narratives resonate with a reading public that was used to a highly theological rhetoric, the former captives had to come to terms with a nature discourse that was centered on a biblical concept of the wilderness. According to Leo Marx, two competing ideas of American nature coexisted in 17th-century England: “[T]he hideous wilderness appears at one end and the garden at the other” (42). The latter image is connected to the pastoral tradition and does not figure strongly in captivity narratives. The romantic literary vision of a pastoral lifestyle served the needs of British society at the time, which faced an enormous population growth while its landscapes became increasingly cultivated. This vision did not translate well to the American colonies, where settlers encountered nature as a dangerous adversary. One of the key claims that scholarship on Early America has made is that the Puritan settlers had a clear idea of what they would find in the ‘New World’ before they even embarked on their voyage there: “Derived largely from Biblical metaphors, these concepts provided New Englanders with elaborate rhetorical devices with which they could judge their own experiences” (Carroll 2). Therefore, the first settlers who had neither seen the American continent nor heard exact descriptions of the conditions in New England nevertheless had very detailed expectations based on their readings of the Bible. Through their interpretation of the Old Testament and fueled by the exegetical doctrine of Typology, Puritans found North American landscapes pre-figured in the Bible: “In this sense the colonists’ conception of the wilderness was more a product of the Old World than of the New” (Nash 35). The “Biblical metaphors” mentioned by Carroll derive from the usage of the term ‘wilderness’ in the English translation of the Bible. From the 14 th century on, the term was here used for “the uninhabited, arid land of the Near East in which so much of the action of the Testaments occurred” (Nash 2-3). 8 The Israelites’ Exodus out of Egypt under the guidance of Moses (Exodus 13-19) is one of the important wilderness-passages of the Bible; within the interpretive system of typology it forms an Old Testament type for which the real American environment could be construed as the anti-type. In the 7 Soon after its publication, Rowlandson’s book was the second most popular book in America, surpassed only by the Bible (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 14). 8 Nash holds that the early Germanic meaning of the term designated uncultivated, woody Northern European landscapes. This interpretation still affects today’s German usage of the term. The use of ‘wilderness’ to describe the deserts of the Bible therefore appears to be a thorough re-interpretation of the term (cf. Nash 1-4). A LEXANDER S TARRE 276 book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are admonished not to forget this Exodus and to honor “the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; / Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were 9 fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water” (Deut 8: 15). 10 The Biblical wilderness we perceive in these lines appears as essentially empty, except for some wild animals. There is no civilization and no water, and consequently no vegetation. The empty wilderness is a topos that recurs in a number of Puritan texts. Significantly, this topos does not only serve illustrative and imaginative purposes, it also provides a (legal) rationale for the appropriation of the land. A classic example is John Cotton’s lay sermon “God’s Promise to His Plantations” from 1630 in which he describes what the settlers will find on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. His central point is that the settlers can declare the land as their own because it is uncultivated. The image of the empty wilderness makes a return here: “in a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is […]. If therefore any sonne of Adam come and finde a place empty, he hath liberty to come, and fill, and subdue the earth there” (67). The ethnocentric European view expressed here does not allow for a system of social organization in which individual land ownership is either not known at all or organized according to different standards. In the English settlers’ view the Indians had forfeited their right to the land by not cultivating it. 11 This biblical concept of ‘wilderness as desert’ could of course not be fully applied to the densely forested landscapes of New England. This discrepancy between a biblical concept and empirical landscapes is already obvious in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, written in the 1620s. When the narrator of Bradford’s account surveys the coast from the ship, he describes the reaction of his group: “Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, fall [sic] of wild beasts and wild men […]” (70). This short excerpt contains a paradoxical construction which pervades Bradford’s text. The word “desolate,” meaning ‘barren’ or ‘deserted,’ refers to the biblical desert, but the New England wilderness is full of humans and animals. Furthermore, it is full of trees: “[…] the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue” (Bradford 70). The evidence of fertility does not keep the narrator from quoting a biblical Psalm in which the arid desert is mentioned: “When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul 9 The use of italics in this paper follows the source texts from which quotations were taken. This holds especially for Rowlandson, whose narrative contains a large amount of italicized passages. 10 For discussions of the Exodus in connection with the Puritans see Carroll 61-126, Herget 39-43. 11 Cf. Herget 42. Wilderness Woes 277 was overwhelmed in them” (Bradford 71). 12 Reconciling the biblical deserts of the Middle East with the flourishing New England landscape was almost impossible - yet the comparisons lingered within Puritan wilderness discourse. The general Puritan attitude towards the unsettled areas of America was thus a negative one: “[T]heir Bibles contained all they needed to know in order to hate wilderness. Contact with the North American wilderness only supplemented what the Puritans already believed” (Nash 35). The Puritan understanding of wilderness, however, encompassed other interpretations as well: “For some, New England signified the New Canaan; others anticipated a barren wasteland; some regarded America as a land of spiritual darkness; and an important segment of the ministry lauded the New World as a refuge” (Carroll 8). A spiritual interpretation of the American wilderness, which disregarded physical reality, was also popular. In this view, the wild country was the abode of the devil; it was a place that had not yet been reached by the word of God and was therefore in a fallen state: “To many, the savage state of the wilderness signified Satanic power; they were convinced that America, the land of spiritual darkness, was the realm of the Antichrist” (Carroll 11). This interpretation had the advantage of providing a symbolic place for the Indians who did not figure strongly in the wilderness-as-desert topos: in the “spiritual darkness” the Indians were construed as accomplices of the devil. 13 Part of the Puritan mission was therefore to convert the Indians to Christianity. The wilderness topos was flexible enough to be used for positive commentary as well. After all, the barren landscapes through which Moses and his compatriots had to march had also been a place of supreme revelation. The hardships of the barren land were seen as tests for their faith; by enduring these tests the Israelites strengthened their commitment to God. Hence, the symbolic wilderness not only figured as a detestable place, it also held an inherent promise. While the confrontation with the American wilderness was felt most intensely by the first settlers, the sharp increase in Anglo-American population over the course of the 17 th century transformed New England into a society increasingly occupied with commercial and regulatory concerns. At midcentury, Edward Johnson turned his eyes away from the wilderness and focused on the achievements of the English communities: [The] remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness […] now through the mercy of Christ becom [sic] a second England for fertilness in so short a space, that it is indeed the wonder of the world […]. 12 Psalm 107: 4-5 13 Cf. Carroll 11, 76-79, 123-24; Nash 36-37. A LEXANDER S TARRE 278 Further, the Lord hath been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in at their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built houses, well furnished many of them, together with Orchards filled with goodly fruit trees, and gardens with variety of flowers […]. (210-11) During this relatively peaceful time, Johnson sees a vanishing wilderness and sketches a pastoral vision of New England. In 1670, however, Samuel Danforth’s jeremiad sermon “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness” marks the return of the wilderness topos to the realm of public discourse. The strong conviction that the people of New England had strayed from the path started by the Pilgrim Fathers and had fallen into a state of declension prompted ministers like Danforth to use the wilderness as a threatening motif in their speeches. An increase in natural disasters supposedly showed God’s displeasure: “Why hath the Lord smitten us with […] severe Drought, […] great Tempests, Floods, and sweeping Rains, that leave no food behind them? ” (Danforth 168). On the other hand, Danforth emphasizes that the settlers left their “pleasant Cities and Habitations” to “enjoy the pure Worship of God in a Wilderness” (155). He condemns the pursuit of worldly goods and holds that the wild American environment is the proper cure for any civilized vanities. The Indians do not figure in Danforth’s sermon, possibly due to the (relatively) peaceful relations at this point in history. While the first-generation towns had been built along the coast, by the 1970s white settlers had ventured deeper inland to establish communities in the midst of the wilderness. Settlements like Rowlandson’s hometown Lancaster lay far away from the centers of New England society such as Boston or Salem. However, with the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, the fragile state of white civilization became apparent: “As the Indians rampaged through the countryside and destroyed numerous towns, the immense dangers of the war reminded second-generation New Englanders that the wilderness continued to be a hostile environment” (Carroll 206). In this context, the first captivity narratives were written. In the form of the well-established wilderness discourse of the preceding decades a whole theological lexicon for the description of nature lay at their disposal. The Puritan wilderness discourse thus contains a multitude of possible connotations. ‘Wild’ areas were seen as being in a fallen state, yet they also were an appealing location for testing one’s faith; physical aspects intermingled with spiritual ones. For the literary scholar, the testimonies of Puritan captives are a treasure chest of references to both cultural concepts and natural spaces. 3 Are We There Yet? While academics commonly approach the dichotomy of nature and culture as a social construct, this distinction nevertheless influences how humans con- Wilderness Woes 279 ceptualize themselves and their environment. The imagined spatial boundaries of the environment determine how societies use, preserve, or destroy the empirical signified of their discursive signifiers. Reading captivity narratives, one immediately becomes aware of the stark contrasts between the places which the captives call home and the territory into which they are forced. In Rowlandson’s story, this difference overshadows the initial moments of her captivity. The narration begins, quite typically, in medias res 14 : “On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster […]” (68). The narrator provides no introduction about her life prior to the gruesome events, nor does she introduce herself at all. 15 The scene she unfolds in the first paragraph is one of gore and murder. She mentions eight individual inhabitants of Lancaster who, in one way or another, fall victims to the raiding Indians. The description of this scene is saturated with gruesome details, which sets the gloomy tone for the narrative (re-)creation of an imaginary space in the ensuing chapters. The first place which carries figurative meaning is the Rowlandsons’ house: “At length they came and beset our own house, and quickly it was the dolefullest day that ever mine eyes saw. The House stood upon the edge of the hill; some of the Indians got behind the hill, others into the Barn, and others behind any thing that could shelter them […]” (ibid.). The focus here shifts to Rowlandson as the protagonist of the story. In little snapshots, the beginning foreshadows the fate that now seems to await the narrator. The description of the house, however, deserves a closer look. As a young frontier town, Lancaster lacked fortifications, so the Indians did not have to fight to get inside the village. Instead, each individual house served both as home and as protection for the inhabitants. Accordingly, Rowlandson describes how the people fled from the Indians to their houses. The location of the Rowlandson house, even more than the others, is presented as a liminal space. It was erected close to the surrounding woods, and is situated “upon the edge of a hill” (68). Within Rowlandson’s plot, the house appears as the last resort of civilization against the forces of nature. Its physical location prefigures its precarious state in confrontation with the enemy. Moreover, the hill is an elevated area, which can be read as a statement on the moral standing of the community. The higher altitude reminiscent of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” - reflects the high degree of culture; to be taken captive by the Indians means to go down from that hill into the lower regions. It is furthermore remarkable that the family chooses to fight for the house instead of running away into the woods in order to flee the Indians. The struggle of the inhabitants of Lancaster appears to be as 14 Cf. Derounian-Stodola and Levernier: “Indeed, this method of beginning in the midst of the action became typical of the form, especially in its shorter versions” (96). 15 “The Preface to the Reader,” most likely written by Increase Mather, precedes the original and most subsequent editions. It introduces Rowlandson, provides a short sketch of the events which led to the attack on Lancaster, and explicitly presents the text as an example of God’s workings. A LEXANDER S TARRE 280 much a struggle for a physical place as it is a symbolic struggle for social and moral order. At the end of this introductory passage, the narrator states: “and that I may better declare what happened to me during that grievous Captivity, I shall particularly speak of the severall Removes we had up and down the Wilderness” (70). This is the first instance in which the narrator uses the word “wilderness”; and even more interestingly she automatically qualifies this space as having a concrete measure. By stating that one can travel “up and down” the wilderness, the narrator demonstrates that for her, wilderness - at least in this instance - is decidedly not a spiritual or biblical category but a territory in New England. Virtually all studies of Rowlandson associate her notion of wilderness with her Puritan beliefs and interpret it as an imagined biblical terrain which was not actually there. While these readings have done much to illuminate the mindset of Rowlandson and other Puritan captives, one has to take a step back and fully appreciate that the narrator also explicitly refers to a specific physical space. The second important word in this passage is “removes”; the narrator neither talks of ‘marches,’ nor of ‘travels,’ nor of ‘voyages.’ By using the term ‘remove,’ Rowlandson implicitly creates a spatial location of belonging - her home. The word implies a move away from something: being ‘removed’ is being absent from a specific place. The OED shows that the noun ‘remove’ in the sense of “[t]he […] act of changing one’s place […]; departure to another place” (“Remove,” def. 5a) was commonly used from the beginning of the 17th to the middle of the 18th century and then became less and less common. A second meaning of the word was “[t]he space or interval by which one person or thing is remote from another, in time, place, condition, etc.; distance” (“Remove,” def. 6a). In both variants, the term functions like a deictic expression, placing the subject at a distance from a known location. Rowlandson thereby establishes a linguistic point of origin in Lancaster from which she strays further away with each remove. The term bears an important religious significance as well: Readers familiar with Puritan rhetoric would have been primed to also hear the deeper sense of removal in Mary’s text - God’s affection had been removed or withdrawn. The growing sense of distance - both spatial and spiritual - the captive had experienced with each successive remove would also have been felt by the reader through the act of reading. (Ebersole 21) By no means should the spiritual aspect of the narrator’s rhetoric be neglected. However, an exclusive focus on this religious subtext tilts the meanings the text tries to convey heavily towards the intangible realm. It cannot suffice to assert that the text has both concrete and spiritual meaning, and then ignore the concrete part, as Ebersole mostly does. One has to remember that while The Sovereignty and Goodness of God might be read as a parable, it is first and foremost the testimony of one woman at one point in time and in a specific place. Wilderness Woes 281 Interestingly enough, the first remove does not lead the narrator directly into the wilderness. Although she states, “Now away we must go […]” (70), the first leg of the journey only takes the company of Indians and captives to a “hill within sight of the Town” (70). For Rowlandson it is especially torturing to be in sight of what she views as civilization, while already having entered the wilderness. During the first night with the Indians, she longs to keep up the appearance of her regular life and sleep in a house: “There was hard by a vacant house (deserted by the English before, for fear of the Indians). I asked them whither I might not lodge in the house that night to which they answered, what will you love English men still? ” (71). The Indians’ deliberate misunderstanding shows the different spatial value systems of the two cultures. The Indians do not seem to understand that a house can have an intrinsic worth. The narrator obviously longed for the shelter of the house, but the Indian captors surmise that she misses the English people. In the chapter about the first remove, the narrator momentarily halts the plot and switches to a reflective mode. She enumerates everything she has lost during the raid: “All was gone, my Husband gone […] my children gone, my Relations and Friends gone, our House and home and all our comforts within door and, without, all was gone (except my life), and I knew not but the next moment that might go too” (71). On a more abstract level, Rowlandson bemoans the loss of place 16 ; she has become place-less. One aspect that feeds her anxiety about the wilderness is therefore her lack of any attachment to it. She defines herself as member of her community, as her husband’s wife, as her children’s mother, and as the owner of certain “comforts.” 17 Outside of this context, however, she loses her identity. The reason for her plight at this stage is not so much what her new environment is, but much more what it is not. The second remove then takes the narrator into a new space for good: “But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the Town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate Wilderness, I knew not whither” (71). “Vast and desolate” are terms taken straight from the Bible. The narrator employs the topos of the empty, deserted wilderness when calling it “desolate,” the term meaning a place that is “in ruinous state or neglected condition” or “without sign of life, bare of trees or herbage, barren” (“Desolate,” def. 5a and b). By employing the orthodox Puritan wilderness discourse, she attaches negative meaning to a space that she has not yet described in detail. The narrator’s introductory sentence contains a paradoxical construction: although Rowlandson does not know where they are traveling to, she is nevertheless sure that it is going to be a bad place. While the reader has not had a 16 Cf. Lawrence Buell’s definition of ‘place’ as “space that is bounded and marked as humanly meaningful through personal attachment, social relations, and physiographic distinctiveness” (Future 145). See also his chapter on the “Five Dimensions of Place- Connectedness” (Writing 64-74). 17 In the field of autobiography studies, this presentation of the self has been termed “relational autobiography.” See Eakin, especially chapter 2. A LEXANDER S TARRE 282 complete rendering of her impressions of nature at this point of the plot, Rowlandson assigns a negative value to the sites she will be describing in subsequent chapters. The reader is supposed to imagine an implied author who records the events as they unfold, not somebody who chronicles her experiences years later. Later in the narrative, when Lancaster is finally out of sight and the narrator spends her first night in cold snow on the bare ground, Rowlandson has left one space and entered another. Her barrier between wilderness and civilization is therefore firmly tied to visual impressions: as long as she can still see (white) civilization, she is not in nature. Only when she loses sight of it has she entered a new realm. Rowlandson’s construction of an imaginary boundary seems intricate enough. However, there is more than one borderline of the wilderness in her story. While being in natural surroundings, the narrator even distinguishes different degrees of wilderness: But to return to my own Journey, we travelled about half a day or little more and came to a desolate place in the Wilderness where there were no Wigwams or Inhabitants before; we came about the middle of the afternoon to this place; cold and wet, and snowy, and hungry, and weary, and no refreshing, for man, but the cold ground to sit on […]. (78) This episode occurs during the fourth remove, i.e. at a point in the story when Rowlandson has already been immersed in the wilderness. In reverse, her statement implies that up to this point she has not been in a true wilderness since it had still been populated and that only now she has entered a truly untouched part of the land. She also associates the Indians and their wigwams with the wilderness. This “desolate place” would then be a more natural wilderness, while the land that had already been shaped by the Indians was a somewhat more cultured wilderness. During the sixth remove, the narrator states: “I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving farther my own Country, and travelling into the vast and howling Wilderness, and I understood something of Lot’s Wife’s Temptation, when she looked back […]” (80). Again, the construction of space here seems paradoxical, or at least incoherent, since the narrator has already described the departure from Lancaster as a step into another locale. Even while positing a clear boundary between town and country, between culture and wilderness, Rowlandson blurs the categories that she has been trying to establish before. On the whole, the narrator of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God attempts to create a clear border between wilderness and civilization, often employing biblical allegories. However, in the specific description of this border region, the dividing line between the two blurs as the narrator depicts individual places within the wilderness. This results in intricate and sometimes paradoxical negotiations between a binary, biblical discourse of wilderness and the more complicated actual New England environment. Wilderness Woes 283 A close look at John Gyles’s Memoirs reveals significant divergences from the rhetorical strategies employed by Rowlandson. Gyles’s story starts with an introduction, in which he sketches a short history of his family. Chapter I begins in a generic manner with the attack of Indians, in this case at the settlement of Pemaquid in Maine. Since Gyles and his parents lived on a farm, the location of his home was not firmly anchored in that village community. Gyles’s captivity starts out in the open, and he is subsequently marched to the town itself and has to watch the Indians’ attack: The Indians led us, their captives, on the east side of the river toward the fort, and, when we came within a mile and [a] half of the fort and town and could see the fort, we saw firing and smoke on all sides. Here we made a short stop and then moved within or near the distance of three-quarters of a mile from the fort into a thick swamp. (98) While this scene resembles that of Rowlandson’s first remove, these lines do not set up a spatial contrast. Gyles even withholds possible value judgments concerning the swamp, an oft-used trope in captivity and war narratives from the colonial period. Usually, swamps are described as hiding places for wolves or Indians, both potentially threatening white travelers or soldiers. 18 In Gyles’s narrative, however, the swamp appears as a safe haven. In a later episode, he is attacked by a group of Micmac Indians who torture him in a cruel dance ceremony. His Indian master, whom the narrator presents in a rather sympathetic light, urges him to hide in a swamp to escape further torture: “My Indian master and his squaw bid me run as for my life into a swamp and hide and not to discover myself unless they both came to me…. I ran to the swamp and hid in the thickest place that I could find” (107). Obviously, the swamp could serve as “the best cover of all” (Lepore 85), not only for Indians, but also for whites. The thick bushes keep the hostile Indian party from finding Gyles in the swamp, which lends the place the positive quality of a shelter. Gyles’s first excursions with the Indians lead him through English towns to Indian villages. He resists constructing a border between the English settlements and the wilderness. In a rather simple, unadorned manner, he records the passage from one town to another and treats the Indian settlements and the woods and rivers in between as if they were one unified space: After the Indians had thus laid Waste Pemaquid, they moved us all to New Harbor. […] That night we tarried at New Harbor, and the next day went in their canoes for Penobscot. […] The next day we went up that eastern branch of Penobscot River many leagues, carried over land to a large pond, and from one pond to another till in a few days we went down a river which vents itself into St. John’s River (99-100). 18 Cf. Breitwieser 83, Cronon 133. A LEXANDER S TARRE 284 In fact, the only appearance of the word ‘wilderness’ in Gyles’s text is attributed to his mother: “Then she said, ‘Poor babe! […] We are going into the wilderness, the Lord knows where’” (99). Yet for the narrator, this word does not fit the territory he encounters. A strong sense of belonging to a settlement obviously encourages the narrative impulse to create robust spatial and evaluative boundaries between the home and the forest. For that reason, the narrator’s familial bonds to Lancaster make the transition to a new territory appear like a sharp contrast in Rowlandson’s narrative. For John Gyles’s narrator, the looser attachment to a town as well as his upbringing as a farmer’s son eradicate the need to envision a wilderness. 4 Traces of the Environment My last point concerns the interrelation between the specific environment the two exemplary captives encountered and the image of nature presented in their narratives. Within the confines of this paper, a brief sketch of how we have to envision the New England environment at the end of the 17th century will have to suffice. As a matter of necessity, this entails briefly leaving the literary domain. Very useful in its wide range of source material and its narrow historical focus is William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. According to Cronon, colonial New England was by no means one ecosystem or even one unified vegetation zone. If anything, the common characteristic of these areas was immense diversity. The landscape contained formations such as open forests, patchy swamps, as well as sandy areas (26-33). These features of the country reveal that if there was wilderness in New England, it was not one wilderness but a multitude of different wildernesses. This explains why Mary Rowlandson perceives different degrees of wilderness; in her marches through New England territory she most likely passed through a number of different vegetational and geological formations and saw different examples of Indian influence on the land. But the variety of the landscape did not only occur in space, it is also bound to a temporal dimension. The seasonal cycles in New England actually similar to the ones in ‘old’ England made the land appear very different depending on the time of the year. Cronon holds that one reason why new settlers were often disappointed by what they found in America was their reliance on promotional tracts and exploratory essays: “Most early descriptions were written by spring and summer visitors, who naturally saw only the times when fish, fruit and fowl were all too numerous to count” (35). Naturally, most explorers never spent the winter in New England since they were only there to survey, record, and then sail back home. Thus, the impressions that Europeans - and consequently also the English Puritans - had Wilderness Woes 285 prior to their journey were heavily tilted toward an ideal picture of everlasting “strawberry time” (Krech 75) in the colonies. A further problematic notion of the Puritan wilderness discourse is the belief that the New England landscape was uncultivated and untouched by human influence. Some studies of colonial literature still follow this reasoning by neglecting the Indians’ influence on the New England environment. However, especially the Indians in southern New England used the mild summer seasons to plant, raise, and harvest crops such as beans and corn (Cronon 42-48). In fact, archeological evidence shows that the Indians tended to deplete resources in certain areas so much that they often had to abandon habitations due to the infertility of the soil (Krech 76). Consequently, the ecosystem of New England was altered by the Indians - though in a way which did not reveal itself easily to European eyes. This diverse ecosystem left a multitude of traces in the captivity narratives. The importance of food for the captives illustrates some of the effects very well. The Indians dealt with the changing availability of food differently than white settlers. They expected a certain part of the year to be starving time. Consequently, Rowlandson calls her diet during her captivity “filthy trash” (79). A large part of the captives’ experience of the wilderness consisted in the complete reversal of eating practices. 19 Towards the end of her narrative, Rowlandson’s narrator includes a small section on this topic: Though many times they would eat that, that a Hog or a Dog would hardly touch; yet by that God strengthened them to be a scourge to His People. The chief and commonest food was Ground-nuts: They eat also Nuts and Acorns; Harty-choaks, Lilly roots, Ground-beans, and several other weeds and roots, that I know not. […] They would eat Horses guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild Birds which they could catch: also Bear, Venison, Beaver, Tortoise, Frogs, Squirrels, Dogs, Skunks, Rattle-snakes; yea, the very Bark of Trees […]. (106) This list of different foods is certainly intended to set the Indians apart from the white settlers; Rowlandson associates them with animals, holding that they are even lower than dogs because they eat things that dogs would not. Moreover, all the things she mentions are ‘wild,’ i.e. the plants were not planted and the animals were not raised by humans. 20 Consequently, the narrator makes the Indians appear as a merely reactive part of an ecosystem and negates their cultivating activities. She disregards practices that she herself included in her narratives, for example the large-scale planting of corn and the organized hunting expeditions of the Indian men. In Rowlandson’s 19 For an overview of the colonial American diet see Oliver. An excellent description of pre-revolutionary New England dishes and eating habits can be found on pages 150-58. To complete the picture, see the comprehensive account of Indian food in Berzok. 20 The strangeness of Indian food became a favorite topic in later captivity narratives. Especially in the 19th century, authors included “supposedly authentic Indian recipes, often as a sales gimmick” (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 108). A LEXANDER S TARRE 286 mind, wild nature supplies all the nourishment that the Indians need to survive. Furthermore, one should not forget two factors that tilted Rowlandson’s picture of the Indian food customs. First, the Narragansetts who captured her were - just like the English - engaged in warfare, which must have disrupted the regular routines of food production and storage. Secondly, her captivity lasted from late February to early May, encompassing a precarious seasonal period in terms of food supply. By this time, Indian food supplies were usually dwindling and newly planted corn was not yet ripe. Both factors most likely combined to make the winter of 1676 a highly irregular one in terms of food supply; the Indians probably had to resort to famine food in order to survive. 21 During her time of captivity, Rowlandson’s opinion of Indian food seems to change. The hurry of the flight away from English settlements usually prevented the captives from eating a lot during the first days of their journey. Her narrator remembers: The first week of my being among them, I hardly ate any thing; the second week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash: but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste. (79) Derounian-Stodola and Levernier interpret passages like this as an indication of a “growing preference” (92) for Indian food and even as a “subconscious identification with her captors” (93). It is more fitting, however, to look at Rowlandson’s dietary preferences from a different point of view: the more refined a certain meal becomes and the more she can compare it to an English meal, the better Rowlandson likes it. Accordingly, the typical edible plants of New England that Rowlandson has to gather at different points of the story to keep from starving are mentioned without any sensory information: “… but going out to see what I could find, and walking among the Trees, I found six Acorns, and two Chesnuts, which were some refreshment to me” (86). Although the acorns and chestnuts keep her alive, there is no pleasure in eating them. The more the Indians prepare the food and refine it, though, the more Rowlandson likes it. In the memorable scene of her first meeting with King Philip, the Indian chief provides her with food: “I went, and he gave me a Pancake, about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fryed in Bears grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life” (83). Here, she describes food preparation extensively. In fact, there are different stages of refinement King Philip’s edible gift: first, the harvested wheat was dried, then beaten or ground into a sort of flour, and lastly shaped into a round form and 21 Even though severe famines were rare among the Northeast Indians, the tribes usually had firm eating rules in place for cases of extreme famine. Cf. Berzok 193-97. Wilderness Woes 287 fried in grease. This process appears to be so familiar that Rowlandson associates an English food with this meal and calls it a “Pancake.” In the following nostalgic passage, Rowlandson tries to retain the natureculture dichotomy: I remembered how on the night before & after the Sabbath, when my Family was about me, and Relations and Neighbours with us, we could pray and sing, and then refresh our bodies with the good creatures of God; and then have a comfortable Bed to ly down on: but in stead of all this, I had only a little Swill for the body, and then like a Swine, must ly down on the ground. (90) Inherent in this passage is a deep conviction that the civilized status of human beings is intricately tied to their diet and place: if one has a house and good food, there is no need to worry; if one has to sleep outdoors and live on a measly diet, one is no better than a pig. The phrase “good creatures of God” refers to the domesticated animals the settlers kept around their homes and consumed during weekends. 22 In reverse, animals that inhabit the forest are not ‘good’ and eating them might be harmful. In these abstract musings, Rowlandson has no problem delineating a rift between the spheres of nature and culture. However, when recounting specific events of the plot, the clear boundary between civilized and natural food disappears with each meal Rowlandson describes. She often mentions Indian “cake” (96; 92) and “broth” (95; 87), thus blurring the distinction between the food that she is used to and the food of the other. Another important aspect of the description of the procurement and consumption of food is the foregrounding of biological needs. The sensation of real, desperate hunger is portrayed as something new: “I cannot but think what a Wolvish appetite persons have in a starving condition […]. And after I was thoroughly hungry, I was never again satisfied. For though sometimes it fell out, that I got enough, and did eat till I could eat no more, yet I was as unsatisfied as I was when I began” (93). Derounian-Stodola and Levernier interpret this passage as metaphorical and equate physical with spiritual hunger (107). While this obvious reading is valid, one should be cautious not to take the second step - stylistic interpretation - before the first one. The reader should be fully aware that the type of hunger Rowlandson describes here is of a different quality than the simple appetite for food that everybody knows from daily life. Rowlandson describes a condition that brings the body to the brink of dying. Consider a passage from the very beginning: “It may be easily judged what a poor feeble condition we were in, there being not the least crumb of refreshing that came within either of our mouths, from Wednesday night to Saturday night, except only a little cold water” (Rowlandson 74). Walking for three full days under extremely arduous conditions - both mentally because of the traumatic scenes she witnesses, and physically because of the winter cold - without eating anything brings 22 The phrase ‘good creature’ stems from biblical usage (cf. 1 Tim. 4) and applies to “food and other things which minister to the material comfort of man” (“Creature,” def. 1c). A LEXANDER S TARRE 288 her body into a state that she cannot ignore: “My head was light and dizzy (either through hunger or hard lodging, or trouble or all together), my knees feeble” (78). Through this experience, she experiences her own body in a new way; she can no longer ignore the natural urges that arise from extreme hunger, threatening to keep her from walking any further and confusing her senses. Rowlandson comes to acknowledge the radical naturalness of her existence. Her starving body seems in danger of merging with the wilderness. In this way, persistent hunger after having eaten, aside from being a biblical metaphor, can also be read as a return of instinct: in a situation where one cannot be sure whether the next day will bring an ample supply of food, one is better off eating as much as possible while food is available. These observations can be utilized to reinterpret Rowlandson’s general preoccupation with food. It is not enough to view the multitude of foodrelated incidents in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God simply as an “image cluster” and treat her descriptions as an example of her “skill as a stylist” (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 107). More is at stake here: the experience of extreme hunger overshadows Rowlandson’s whole narrative style. Instead of describing the pain the Indians inflicted on her, Rowlandson’s plot reflects what really mattered in captivity. The recurring images of daily worries about provisions prove that during the times when captives were not in physical danger this meant first and foremost the procurement of food. John Gyles presents a more intricate account of the role of food. What sets his story apart is the length of his captivity and accordingly the greater details he can provide about Indian dietary practices. What appears in Rowlandson as a disordered, haphazard way of gathering food, Gyles presents as regular, planned agricultural and hunting practices that vary according to the season: There we planted corn and, after planting, went a-fishing and to look for and dig roots till the corn was fit to weed. And after weeding, [we] took a second tour on the same errand and returned to hill our corn. And after hilling, we went some distance from the fort and field up the river to take salmon and other fish and dry them for food till corn was filled with the milk, some of which we dried then, the other as it ripened. And when we had gathered our corn and dried it, we put some Indian barns, i.e., holes in the ground lined and covered with bark and then with dirt. The rest we carried up the river upon our next winter hunting. (105) This rendering of Indian eating habits differs vastly from Rowlandson’s notion of getting by “from hand to mouth” (106). It also shows a wealth of food which Rowlandson could not witness because of the short duration of her captivity and the heightened intensity of fighting. While Gyles had to go through intense torture during his captivity, most of the times he seems to have been treated like a member of the tribe. Although Rowlandson’s canon- Wilderness Woes 289 ized captivity narrative provides a different picture, this practice was the rule rather than the exception. 23 Where Rowlandson associates the Indians with wilderness to demean them, Gyles appears intent on benefiting from their knowledge of the local fauna: I was once traveling a little way behind several Indians and heard them laughing very merrily. When I came to them, they showed me the track of a moose and how a wolverine had climbed a tree, [it] had broke the wolverine’s hold and torn him off, and by his track in the snow he went off another way with short steps, as if he had been stunned with the blow. The Indians who impute such accidents to the cunning of the creature were wonderfully pleased that the moose should thus outwit the mischievous wolverine. (118) While the white colonists often attributed their sense of civilized superiority to their mastery of written language, this episode turns the familiar framework of oral and written culture around. The English narrator is the one who cannot make sense of a given set of signs while the Indians can easily read a whole adventure story from a number of tracks in the snow. Gyles shows the Indians as much more connected to nature than his own culture. The Indians’ skill of reading tracks enriches his own experience of the New England environment and provides him with material for his chapter on the most common animals of the region. Gyles’s narrative is unique in its treatment of wildlife. Rowlandson only mentions wild animals as potential food, while Gyles has a whole chapter on animal life around the St. John’s River. It contains short reports on beavers, wolverines, hedgehogs, tortoises, and salmon (116-20). Although the main selection principle here is the value of these animals as food, Gyles treats each of these species with an uncommon precision, observing and chronicling their appearance, mating habits, etc. Take the following description of hatching tortoises: I have observed a difference as to the length of time which they are hatching, which is between twenty and thirty days, some sooner than others. […] As soon as they were hatched, they broke through the sand and betook themselves to the water, as far as I could discover, without any further care or help of the old ones. (119) Gyles’s text possesses an uncommon degree of hybridity, containing features of the captivity narrative and providing a natural history at the same time. After having returned to white society he in fact became a true frontiersman, serving as an interpreter for Indians and a surveyor of land. In their differing degrees of adherence to clerically accepted notions of the wilderness, these two narratives generally appear as a site of conflict and reconciliation between abstract notions and concrete occurrences. Instead of being the supreme guiding principle in the construction of nature, however, 23 Most captives were in fact adopted into the tribes to fill the void left by Indians lost to war and diseases (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 5). A LEXANDER S TARRE 290 religion turns out to be only one aspect among many. Personal attachment to certain places, the degree of social immersion, as well as the seasonal varieties and the geographical setup of each captivity also figure strongly. 5 Conclusion In conclusion, we may ask what we can gather from this survey of two Puritan narratives that can be considered relevant in the context of 21st-century challenges of urbanity and ecology. First of all, we may perceive the tension between a discourse of nature and empirical nature itself - a tension which accompanies any type of writing concerned with the environment. The constructional character of this opposition is as strong as ever today. In comparison to the colonial wilderness discourse, the current mainstream conception of wild nature in the Western world seems much friendlier. However, the belief that the environment must be green and woody in order to qualify for care and conservation can lead to questionable consequences - for example, when this green Western ideology collides with an empirical Middle-Eastern desert. As such, the creation of sprawling parks with lush greenery in a transcultural metropolis like Dubai shows how discourses can shape the environment in a frighteningly non-sustainable manner. Such constellations of spaces and ideas will likely grow in number in an increasingly globalized society. Ecocritical scholarship can show the ways in which cultures have tried to make sense of spaces in their narratives - now and in the past. It is easy to read Puritan texts with a skeptical eye and dismiss their content as theologically biased against the environment. However, we tend to underestimate the flexibility of the captivity genre. It has become commonplace to associate the genre with Mary Rowlandson. Survey courses on the history American literature often leave little room for a more in-depth study of early captivity narratives. Furthermore, critical accounts of the significance of the environment in American literary history tend to typify the Puritan wilderness as the dark counterpart to 19th century sublime nature. The unfortunate effect is that the genre has not appeared attractive enough for environmentally interested scholars. Recent ecocritical essays call the environment in captivity tales “New England landscapes of terror” (Neubauer 350) or “the hiding place of the plotting and scheming devil” (Peprnik 339). These sweeping generalizations disregard diversity within the captivity genre. I do not intent to deny the tremendous cultural reverberations of Rowlandson’s popular narrative. It did go a long way to further the ideology of cultivation and to associate the Indians with wildness. This fed into such seemingly positive, yet inherently patronizing stereotypes as the “ecological Indian.” 24 Rowlandson’s view of the wilderness informs the spatial poetics of later rewritings of colonial stories, for example Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales 24 Cf. Berkhofer, Krech. Wilderness Woes 291 (1837). It certainly had an impact on the visual aesthetics of American landscape painting, where dark forests often yield to the light of colonizing civilization. Take the overly allegorical painting American Progress (1872) by John Gast, which shows a radiant Columbia carrying light - and a telegraph wire - into the dark abodes of the Western wilderness. However, the roots of a different discourse appear in narratives such as John Gyles’s. The environmental criticism of the 21st century is strongest when it can reposition certain texts according to their relation to the natural world and thus shed light on commonly disregarded aspects of composition and sense-making. As Greg Garrard points out: “The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which ‘nature’ is always in some ways culturally constructed and the other on the fact that nature really exists” (10). While this method of observation will at times require turning a blind eye to some ingrained academic practices, it certainly has the potential to enlarge our field of vision with regard to representations of natural spaces. A LEXANDER S TARRE 292 Works Cited Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001. Bak, Hans, and Walter W. Hölbling, eds. ‘Nature’s Nation Revisited’: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VU UP, 2003. Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978. Berzok, Linda Murray. American Indian Food. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. 1856. Intro. Francis Murphy. New York: Modern Library, 1981. Branch, Michael P. “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Ed. Steven Rosendale. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2002. 3-15. ---. “Before Nature Writing: Discourses of Colonial American Natural History.” Armbruster and Wallace 91-107. Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. ---. “Green Disputes: Nature, Culture, American(ist) Theory.” Bak and Hölbling 43-50. ---. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2001. Carroll, Peter N. Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. Cotton, John. “God’s Promise to His Plantations.” 1630. Colonial American Writing. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Holt, 1969. 64-77. “Creature.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2 nd ed., 1989. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1983. Rev. ed. New York: Hill-Farrar, 2003. Danforth, Samuel. “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness.” 1671. American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr. Ed. Michael Warner. Library of America 108. New York: Classics, 1999. 151-71. Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and James Arthur Levernier. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 605. New York: Twayne, 1993. “Desolate.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2 nd ed., 1989. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Ebersole, Gary L. Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1995. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Gast, John. American Progress. 1872. American Memory. The Library of Congress. 3 May 2010 <http: / / memory.loc.gov/ ammem/ awhhtml/ aw06e/ d10.html>. Gyles, John. “Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc.” 1736. Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724. Ed. Alden T. Wilderness Woes 293 Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1981. 93- 131. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Twice-Told Tales. 1837. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vol. 9. Ed. William Charvat. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974. Herget, Winfried. “Anders als der Rest der Welt: Die Puritaner in der amerikanischen Wildnis.” Colonial Encounters: Essays in Early American History and Culture. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 29-50. Johnson, Edward. The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England. 1653. Ed. J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Barnes, 1967. Krech, Shepard, III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton, 1999. Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf, 1998. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Galaxy-Oxford UP, 1967. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind. 1967. 4 th ed. New Haven, CT: Yale-Nota Bene, 2001. Neubauer, Paul. “American Landscapes of Terror: From the First Captivity Tales to Twentieth Century Horror Stories.” In Bak and Hölbling, eds., 347-65. Oliver, Sandra L. Food in Colonial and Federal America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. 1776. Collected Writings. Ed. Eric Foner. New York: Library of America, 1995. 5-60. Peprnik, Michal. “The Place of the Other: The Dark Forest.” In Bak and Hölbling, eds., 339-46. “Remove.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2 nd ed., 1989. Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. Ed. Neal Salisbury. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1997. C HERYL L OUSLEY Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger: Cosmopolitanism in Dionne Brand’s Long Poems Thirsty and Inventory The city has functioned throughout modernity as the imagined space where strangers meet - and is thus both threatening and exciting. This urban conflux has acquired new significance in the revival of cosmopolitanism as a mode of political critique, ethics, and belonging appropriate to the complex inequities and interrelations of global societies. The stranger is the litmus test for cosmopolitanisms because of the desire for ethical standpoints and political institutions that can navigate between an appropriative universalism (which reduces all the same) and cultural essentialism (where each is locked within a distinct moral system). Liberal humanists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum place ethical regard for human strangers as the central hope and challenge of a cosmopolitanism envisioned as a form of multiculturalism extended past the boundaries of the urban center and nation-state. In this Kantian view, cosmopolitanism is an ethics or virtue (see Benhabib) that supersedes nationalist exclusions and enmities. Postcolonial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai are hesitant about such universalist visions, which neglect the power relations involved in granting authority to a particular global stance or naturalized identity. Instead, they foreground how political space and resistance can be found in difference, fragmentation, and hybridization, exemplified by the transnational identities that take form among diasporic communities, in urban spaces, and via electronic media. The figure of the stranger is a useful metaphor for both perspectives because the stranger is not so much one who is clearly (and essentially) different but rather one who is unknown to the subject, who does not yet fit into existing social categories. The stranger is an outsider, but not necessarily an enemy (nor yet a friend). The politics of space are crucial to the significance of the stranger because the threat he - or she - or they - pose, or economic and cultural opportunity they bring, is related to the delineation and control of territory. Aestheticized as an exotic, the stranger may appear to pose no threat to existing power formations (see Bauman). But when standing on the threshold of one’s house or nation or consciousness, and demanding entry, hospitality, even permanent residence, the stranger unsettles (see Derrida; Kristeva). To speak of the stranger is to point to liminal encounters that take place on the cusp of knowledge, ethics, and sociality. The stranger is thus a C HERYL L OUSLEY 296 pivotal site for imagining and negotiating the uncanny intersections of local and global. In environmental thought, the stranger has commonly appeared as a threat that disrupts the bucolic and secure home environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring infamously opens with an allegory of DDT as the “enemy within the gates,” the toxic poison unleashed by the people themselves, a theme also apparent in the discourse of “invasive species.” Ursula Heise describes how densely crowded Third World cities figured prominently in environmental ethics and popular culture of the 1960s and 70s, symbolically depicting poor masses clamoring for a share of scarce global resources as a threat to global survival. Heise suggests that in the United States these dystopian global visions contributed to an embrace of localism based on “the attachment to or ‘reinhabitation’ of the local through a prolonged residence, intimate familiarity, affective ties, and ethical commitment” (50). Heise argues that the ethical equation of intimacy, familiarity, and staying in one place lends itself to a sharp divide between naturalized categories of “locals” and “outsiders,” and underwrites the xenophobia and anti-immigrant discourse found in some forms of contemporary US environmentalism. As Giovanna Di Chiro and other environmental justice critics have shown, it tends to be anti-urban for similar reasons, despite the ecological efficiencies and cultural vibrancy of urban forms. Localism, when fetishized as a realm of authenticity, represents a retreat from the complex global flows of finance, resource, media, technology, and discourse that characterize modernity (see Appadurai), rather than a search for socially and ecologically just means of negotiating them. Despite the ubiquitous imagery of global unity that courses through environmental thought - from NASA’s “blue planet” photographs from space to the 1992 Earth Summit or the common-sensical slogan “think global, act local” - globalism, no less than localism, also poses challenges for pursuing environmental justice. As Heise acknowledges, the local can provide a space for resistance to the ecological destruction enabled by distant, unaffected decision-makers. The “view from nowhere,” as Donna Haraway aptly describes it, that an apparently global perspective enables is characteristic of the exploitative reach of colonialism and capitalism, subsuming the resources, lands, labour, and lifeworlds of others into an unequal global economy. Several scholars have critiqued the popular environmental discourse of the global adopted in the North for obfuscating the postcolonial political economy and neglecting significant differences of power and culture (Sachs; Shiva). The right to remain a stranger, to live in what may seem “strange” ways, should not be occluded under the guise of planetary survival. At the same time, as Bruno Latour has noted (“Whose Cosmos? ”), cosmopolitan thinkers who envision a global multiculturalism, where diversity amicably flourishes, appear to neglect the ecological stakes and territorial exigencies involved in pursuing particular ways of life. Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 297 Post-Marxist thinkers such as Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, and Saskia Sassen therefore place their emphasis on political economy rather than difference. Concerned with the shifting structures of capitalism that rely on financial and labour mobility without the welfare and democratic protections of the nation-state, they are more equivocal about privileging the local, urban, national, or international. They suggest that nationalist sentiment can provide both the common identity that gives the political functions of the state legitimacy and the grounds for exploitation and disenfranchisement of minorities within or others outside the polis. We must be cautious, then, about fetishizing the stranger, and neglecting the bonds that tie the polis together. Moreover, the rarely questioned assumption that the figure of the stranger is a human person from a distant place or different culture 1 does not engage with the full range of ethical and political challenges posed by environmental thought. Environmental justice raises for ethical consideration a wide range of figures not accommodated by Kantian premises of moral reasoning nor Habermasian communicative politics, including children, animals, future generations, places, and the biosphere, as well as non-citizens at risk due to environmental hazards we produce and economic inequalities that benefit us. It is in resistance to the general assumption that non-humans hold no value other than as resources, and that places are mere background and pose in themselves no ethical demands, that ecocriticism and environmental thought have tended to promote and examine intimacy with place, animals, and nature. To engage with the position of the stranger nevertheless has some parallels within environmental ethics. Neil Evernden argues that the moral disregard for non-humans is due to the objectivist paradigm of modern science, which has created a de-sacralized world of objects. As Carolyn Merchant describes, the “death of nature” by modern epistemology enables unchecked ecological degradation - the actual deadening of the living world. Drawing on Martin Buber’s distinction between the I-Thou and the I-It relationship, Evernden advocates instead an ethical stance toward non-humans based on dialogue with a Thou - an other rather than an object. He urges an appreciation for the difference of other species in the face of a homogenizing and appropriating planetary view that collapses all life-worlds into a single space of human habitation. Evernden offers not so much a cosmopolitan view as a pluralizing of the cosmos that maintains the importance of place as the location from which one engages with the world. Although Evernden does not equate locality with human authenticity (calling humans “natural aliens”), he promotes a phenomenological cultivation of intimate and sensory knowledge associated with the local sphere as an antidote to the objectification of living beings. 1 Jacques Derrida’s work on the question of the animal and notions of hospitality is a notable exception to this assumption that pervades the cosmopolitanism debates. C HERYL L OUSLEY 298 The conceptual challenges of theorizing nature and difference are similar to those faced by postcolonial and cosmopolitan theorists. Emphasizing the difference of non-humans presents the twin specters of objectification (treated as if having no intrinsic value) and exoticism (set aside for special treatment). William Cronon’s critique of wilderness discourse points to the dangers of exoticism. Taking nature to be a pure, untouched space far from where we live functions to erase the presence of local inhabitants and to legitimize disregard for the livability of the areas where most people do live. But bringing animals or nature into ethics via humanist models of identification, or into politics through a chain of equivalent oppressions also have shortcomings, tending to deny and suppress the specificities on all sides of the equation. Differences of voice, agency, capability, history, and desire do matter (see Sandilands). Haraway’s postulation of the hybrid identity of the cyborg shifts the debate from ontological differences to material connections situated within global political economies, but the metaphor has proved difficult to extract from its techno-triumphalist connotations. Latour attempts a similar strategy by analyzing the material networks that connect particular sites to other sites across time and space to produce entanglements of humans and non-humans. A commitment similar to Evernden’s to potentially treat all entities as ends, not merely means, provides his moral framework. The political challenge, he suggests in Politics of Nature, is to engage in diplomatic relations between these strangers, building alliances (and naming enemies) in order to craft a just common world. Diasporic Poetics A rapprochement between cosmopolitanism and environmentalism is offered in the recent poetry of Dionne Brand. Brand is one of the most significant Canadian poets and black poets writing today. Also a novelist, essayist and filmmaker, Brand first earned international acclaim with her poetry collection No Language is Neutral, published in 1990. The title poem presents a diasporic subject split between two places, “home” and “here,” her sense of self and voice fractured by her painful memories yet desire for the lush green island of Trinidad, and the racialized abjection the immigrant finds in the concrete city of Toronto. Brand’s long poem Land to Light On, published in 1997, mourns the failure of collective and national politics in the postcolonial world. Symbolically located outside the Canadian nation yet residing within it, the speaker in Land to Light On is apprehensive about the territorialized violence and exclusions of the nation-state and nationalisms, avowing (in the most commonly quoted line from the poem), “I don’t want no fucking country, here / or there and all the way back” (48). Forgoing the nation, however, is no simple matter, as diasporic subjects, whose claims to territory and citizenship are precarious, know better than most. Land to Light On shows how identity, place, and politics are closely intertwined: that one is always posi- Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 299 tioned somewhere, that who we are is articulated in relation to place, and that places have histories and politics, however much a vast snowy landscape may appear a blank and empty whiteness. Place is not taken for granted in Brand’s poetry but interrogated as a contested site embedded in local, national, and transnational relations. Brand’s latest long poems, Thirsty (2002) and Inventory (2006), show a shift in focus from political recognition of the self who has been positioned as other, to an ethical relationship with the stranger. Thirsty is an elegy to a black man murdered by police in Toronto, a stranger who lived, walked, and died in the spaces of the same city as the poet. Inventory is not set in a single city, but foregrounds the material flows and communication technologies that violently connect strangers located in different places across the planet. The figure of the stranger that appears in Thirsty and Inventory can be read as the culmination of Brand’s ambivalence toward territorialized identities. The stranger is not an outsider, but rather, along the lines of cosmopolitan theorists who take global cities to be landing points for multiple diasporas (Conley; Breckenridge et al.), an unknown other with whom one shares common ground. The post-national, “diasporic city” makes everyone at some time a stranger (Burman). The appearance of the stranger is a reminder that the city - or the planet - is not totally known or claimed by oneself or one’s own. These poems make a unique contribution to theorizing cosmopolitanism and environmentalism because they envision transcultural spaces not only as a physical ground where strangers meet, but also as living realms, intimately experienced but nevertheless full of strangers, human and non-human. Thirsty : Cosmopolitan City The speaker in Thirsty finds the city moribund and lifeless on first impression, full of “broken things” like “the shrinking lake” and the “smashed night birds” who fly into skyscraper lights (1). Alan, dying on his doorstep, is another of these “broken things,” and likely a reference to Albert Johnson, killed by police in the entrance to his home in August 1979, witnessed by his wife and daughter - a murder which mobilized the black community to political action against the long and continuing history of police shootings of black men in Toronto (see Jackson). The poem compares Alan’s crumpled body to the cultivars of his garden: “clematis cirrhosa and a budding grape vine he was still / to plant when he could, saying when he had fallen, ‘…thirsty…’” (4). The word “thirsty,” which gives the poem its title, is preceded and followed by ellipses. The word indicates desire and anticipation, a life wanting and planning to live, to grow, to bloom; the ellipses keep this desire incomplete and indecipherable, even as Alan turns into a symbol for a beleaguered black community when “his chest flowered stigma of scarlet bergamot” (21). Thirsty mourns the many lives cut short and stifled, includ- C HERYL L OUSLEY 300 ing the birds, the lake, Alan, and Alan’s widow, whose “face was waterless” after years of domestic joylessness and violence (38). The poem intertwines diasporic experience and the plight of nature, and places the narrative of Alan’s death within an ecological context. The everpresent smog suggests the poem is also an elegy to the memory of nature; the loss of a black man is related to these other losses in the city. The city is an “urban barracoon” (11) where lives are stifled because the very air is toxic - with racism and exhaust fumes: “breathing, you can breathe if you find air” (11). The land, air, and water that support the life of the city is backgrounded, out of sight and out of mind: “Every night the waste of the city is put out and taken away / to suburban landfills and recycling plants, / and that is the rhythm everyone would prefer in their life” (62). Black men, too, appear to be treated like detritus to be cleared away. A landscape of death prevails in the “strip malls of ambitious immigrants” (11), part of a normalized acceptance that the immigrant is not really permitted to live in this place: “We live here / but don’t think that we’re going to live like people here! ” (37). The people are thus strangers to the place. The poem echoes with what it terms “conditional sentences about conditional places” (37): “‘If we were home. / I would . . . ’ as strong a romance with the past tense as with what is / to come” (37). If racial exclusion means living in Canada feels like a “conditional sentence,” only provisionally accepted, then giving in to that sense of not-belonging leaves the immigrant living a deferred life in a city only seen as a temporary stop, a “conditional place” that does not matter. Oscillating between nostalgia for “what they choose to remember” and ambition for a better life, these immigrants are “buried in…suburbs undifferentiated, prefabricated from no great / narrative, except cash” (36). With no affective attachments to the place, the land holds value only as property and capital. As a result, much like Alan’s thirst for life is shot dead, the living earth is smothered in the scramble for development: “unflagging dreariness dries the landscape, meagre oases of woodland / fight gas stations and donut shops for any thing named beauty/ […] This suburban parching would dry bog” (36). Alan’s thirst mirrors the thirst of the drained and denuded land - both strive for life and beauty. Brand’s combination of the aesthetic and ecological is no pastoral gaze upon an idealized landscape but rather an environmental politics based on what urban theorists term “livability” and ecofeminists discuss in terms of “flourishing.” For feminist and environmental justice thinkers, advocating for the intrinsic value of nature must be intertwined (though not equated) with arguing for the intrinsic value of the lives of women, people of colour, and the poor. Val Plumwood and Chris Cuomo argue for the promotion of the “mutual flourishing” of human and nonhuman life (Plumwood 30), an ethico-political stance that recognizes the right to pursue one’s own wellbeing and the justice of enabling the well-being of others, human and nonhuman, individually and ecosystemically. Environmental justice similarly brings together social and ecological concerns, such as toxic hazards, ade- Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 301 quate housing, employment, and parks, under the banner of an equal right to quality of life. Against the exoticism associated with wilderness-focused environmentalism or sustainability’s focus on bare survival, “environmental justice activists define the environment as ‘the place you work, the place you live, the place you play’” (Di Chiro 301). As Chaia Heller explains, “When activists focus solely on questions of ecological need and survival, they fail to recognize the qualitative concerns of poor peoples who also share desires for a meaningful and pleasurable quality of life” (2). Thirsty suggests that flourishing is undermined by the “conditional sentences” that devalue both people and places, but the poem nevertheless embraces the cosmopolitan possibilities of the diasporic city. The title phrase is reinterpreted with a page break to suggest the bustling promise of life in the city: “Alan fell down whispering, ‘…thirsty…’ / / which is to say, human. I did hear the city’s susurrus, / loud, wide, promising, like wine, obscurity and rapture, / the bright veiled Somali women hyphenating Scarlett Road” (39-40). Murmurs of life, hyphenated identities bring the streets to life with conversations in new, hybrid languages: “At the Sea King Fish Market, / the Portuguese men have learned another language. ‘Yes sweetie, yes dahling, and for you only this good good price.’ This to the old Jamaican women” (40). The lines act like streets that bridge multiple diasporas, the cacophony a spontaneous emergence of new formations. Toronto’s famed cultural and linguistic diversity 2 is directly linked to its urban infrastructure and density: “The tunnel breathes in the coming train exhaling / as minerals the grammar of Calcutta, Colombo, / Jakarta, Mogila and Senhor do Bonfim, Robeira Grande / and Hong Kong, Mogadishu and the alias St. Petersburg” (20). The subway provides a constantly moving yet common ground for this multicultural conflux; the plurality of grammars the precious ore that makes the city work. For all the joy the multicultural crowds suggest, there is no seamless intersection of diversity and justice, nor immigrant opportunity and ecological sustainability. The poem resists the rhythm of death by enacting its own form of urban inhabitation, breaking the conditional sentence by committing to the here and now. The poet moves into the city by “writing the biographies / of streets” (40) and mapping its mundane crossroads: “the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, / the milk store and the church” (3). Following Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges” and Katherine McKittrick’s description of black women’s geography as “cartographies of struggle,” I would describe Thirsty as presenting a ‘situated cartography’ - a cartography 2 Commonly referred to as the most multicultural city in the world, Toronto is largely populated by recent immigrants, who come from a wide range of places of origin. According to recent Statistics Canada reports, “Almost three-quarters of Torontonians aged 15 or older have direct ties to immigration. About one-half (52%) are themselves immigrants while another 22% are second generation immigrants with at least one parent born outside of Canada” (“Diversity”). Close to half have a mother tongue other than English (“Diversity”). C HERYL L OUSLEY 302 of the everyday; it resists re-enacting the exclusionary claims of territory by tracing movement through the public spaces that bring one together with strangers. Each character is associated with transit: waiting for trolleys, riding buses, moving with the multicultural crowds on the subway, or the joyful freedom of cycling: “a bicycle, / a sparrow of light, and meter, velocity itself” (18). Physical movement in the city brings an openness to possibility and engagement with life in its various, unexpected forms: “you feel someone brush against you, / on the street, you smell leather, the lake, / the coming leaves, the rain’s immortality” (57). Much like Evernden’s phenomenologically based environmental ethics, a sensory openness to the others around is here postulated as a form of resistance to their objectification or dismissal. The speaker herself is a stranger to Alan, his wife Julia, and his daughter Chloe, the figures who haunt the poem. She is someone who merely brushes against them in the street: “I don’t remember that frail morning, how / could I? No one wakes up thinking of a stranger” (22). Against the “feral amnesia” (24) that allows us to forget the garbage carried away in the night, or the unknown lives ended in snap flashes of racist violence, the poem takes the diverse encounters of the here and now as the basis for a “cosmopolitanism from below” (Cheah 21), that can bring to life a new city, where many might cultivate “some thing of beauty,” allowing ourselves and the land to flourish. Inventory : Planetary Ethics The grief for the stranger that the speaker feels in Thirsty is extended beyond both city and nation in Brand’s long poem Inventory as a form of ethical and political response to the violence and destruction occurring across the planet. But the immediacy and joy of the urban encounter (with rain, with other people) is reversed in Inventory, which focuses on violent connections to the distant stranger. The poem presents an unnamed subject who is compelled to respond to the violence of her time, much of which passes daily before her eyes through the screens of television and cinema: “One year she sat at the television weeping, / no reason, / the whole time / / and the next, and the next” (21). The television makes the speaker “the wars’ last and late night witness” (21); she becomes a witness to the deaths of unknown and unnamed victims of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without leaving her living room. By focusing on the impersonal position of being a witness without being present (in which the mediation of communication technologies removes the possibility of one-on-one contact in the street), the poem resists incorporating the stranger into one’s known world, and, instead, attends to the ethical dimensions of usually invisible ecological and commodity networks. Where Thirsty develops a cosmopolitan openness to others, Inventory locates this cosmopolitan ethics within a global political economy and ecology. Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 303 The ecological desolation of the city in Thirsty - its smoggy air, desiccated wetlands, meagre woods, and garbage piles - is extended to a planetary scale in Inventory: “the forests we destroyed, / as far as / the Amazonas’ forehead, the Congo’s gut” (7). This destruction is “everywhere” (7); it stretches across the continents, across the mythic maps of pristine origins and jungle interiors. Re-appropriating the cartographic imposition of the human figure upon the landscape, the poem imagines the planet itself as a fleshy, human-like body; it is “this shorn planet,” a body clipped bare and naked through deforestation (85). Alive and breathing, it is the personified Gaia, the mythological Greek goddess of the Earth, given an ecological aura in climate scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” which posits the planet as a selfregulating system that maintains the conditions for life. Inventory evokes the planetary to suggest both the ecological relations that sustain living creatures and a cosmopolitan vision of citizenship that recognizes obligations to others unlike ourselves. The poem traces injustices and ecological degradation through global relations of consumption and production with the example of the cell phone. Instead of enabling communication between distant places, the cell phone materially links strangers who yet remain strangers to one another: there are cellphones calling no one, no messages burn on the planet’s withered lungs all that koltan from Kahuzi-Biega, the landslides, to carry nothing (41) The Gaian imagery of a living, breathing planet whose lungs “wither” as tropical forests are lost is localized and historicized with the reference to coltan mining in Kahuzi-Biega, a Democratic Republic of Congo national park. Used in light-weight electronics like cell phones, coltan has fetched high prices on the world market since the late 1990s, helping to fuel civil war in the Congo and involving thousands of people working in the illegal mining operations and mining trade under violent and dangerous conditions (“Report”). The image of the cell phone “calling no one” and “carry[ing] nothing” is a bitter indictment of the willful ignorance induced by commodity fetishism. The labour, land, and materials that produce the cell phone, and the forests lost in consequence, are so easily rendered invisible. Consumers in the global north are linked materially to the global south, but no message is passed between them. The poem does not attempt to recuperate the unheard voices from the Congo, but rather traces the cell phone and its material networks to the bodies of anonymous consumers, adding it to “the mollient burdens carried in knapsacks, / all the footwear and headgear and SUVs, / the anodyne poets of jingles” (41). Rather than a heroic “cosmopolitanism from below,” the poem confronts the middle-class “banal cosmopolitanism” (Beck 28), the everyday routines through which identities become based on global processes. The poem resists personalizing either side of the consumer exchange, mimicking how consumer goods and jingles act as signs of per- C HERYL L OUSLEY 304 sonal identity while things taken as commodities are detached from the lives of those who produce them. Throughout the poem, those who suffer from poverty, dangerous work, and military and state violence are and remain strangers; unlike Alan in Thirsty, they are not even named. Brand mimics and exposes the depersonalizing strategies of violence and commodification by using the form of an inventory, a list or catalogue of things, to detail global suffering. Nameless, not identified by nation or race, only rarely by gender or age, victims are reduced to their victim status: “let us all deny our useless names in solidarity” (78). Only the method and place of their death is named and particular: by malaria, by hemorrhagic fevers, by hungers, by fingerprint, by dogs and vigilantes by arrests near the tunnel, in arrest by La Migra in Brewster County, Hidalgo County, Dona Ana County, and Zapata County (39) Method replaces narrative: there are no persons, only agents and acts. Nations, too, are absent, though their borders policed. Instead, places are localized as cities, parks, neighborhoods, and rural counties. Without names, nations, or narratives, the poem seems to evacuate politics. Like the television news, the poem leaves the perpetrators of destruction absent and invisible; violence can appear as the inevitable social norm of people living elsewhere: “the Arab faces were Arab faces after all” (22). Strangers can remain other, dismissed from ethical purview. However, it is in resisting names that Inventory foregrounds the ethical responsibility of witnesses and beneficiaries, the anonymous spectators at their television screens. The poem turns the gaze back onto the spectator, concomitantly shifting the site of political engagement and ethical relationship from abstract entities like the nation-state or global humanity to “here,” the place where one lives and watches the events of the world: “in documentaries, in liquid surfaces, / in oceanic blue screens, in disappearances in / the secret seas of living rooms here” (39). Inventory metaphorically materializes what is usually taken to be television’s symbolic collapse of the distance between near and far. The poem interpellates anonymous spectators and consumers, laborers and refugees into a planetary ethical community based on the flow of materials and images from place to place (from there to “here”; “here” to there). Inventory thus gives an ethical imperative and ecological emphasis to Appadurai’s argument that globalization can be understood as a series of overlapping yet disjunct flows of capital, resource, image, and discourse. The poem places “here” within entangled networks that crisscross the planet. By insisting on an ethical response to strangers who remain strangers, Brand, like those who embrace a diasporic cosmopolitanism, appears skeptical about closing the distance between “here” and “there” by denying difference, but similarly finds a planetary rather than national framework necessary for adequately accounting for our responsibilities. However, unlike most Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 305 approaches to cosmopolitanism, her poem traces social, economic, and ecological relations across the planet while resisting portraying the Earth merely as a space of human habitation. Not only does the poem repeatedly picture the planet as a living, vulnerable body, it also describes it as bursting with life of many different forms. In sharp contrast with the absence of human names and voices in the body count, “the birds of the world” are given exuberant name in the poem (85): the banded pitta, the mangrove pitta, the bulbul, the iora, the red-naped and scarlet-rumped trogon, the fire-tufted barbet, flame back, philentoma, the rufous-throated wren babbler… (85) The speaker admonishes the reader to “listen to all the laughing thrushes, / striated, white throated, orange headed, all” (86), simultaneously insisting on the diversity and the presence of these strangers, that each is to be addressed as Thou, not It. The planet in Inventory is what David Abram has usefully termed a “more-than-human world.” The phrase situates human societies within a larger collective without lumping together other lives and ecological processes into a passive and monolithic category like “nature.” Sensuous connection to the more-than-human world is the subject of the final inventory in Brand’s poem, in which the speaker celebrates the bodily joy of being alive in a living world. These lists risk establishing nature yet again as a “standing reserve,” as Martin Heidegger observes: a storehouse of goods ready and available for use (or aesthetic pleasure). But the attention to embodied singularity undermines the totalizing gesture of the end-of-season inventory, when the storekeeper tallies up all his possessions: “armadillos, morrocoys and one-inch pandas, / all different, don’t be mistaken, they’re not simple, / not as simple as the ways to kill them” (96). In echoes of the urban cosmopolitanism of Thirsty, the speaker lyrically recalls the sensory memories of singular encounters: […] the one that blue morning in Les Coteaux, the one on the way to Firenze with the baby on the train, and the flight and dive of pelicans, the scent of sandalwood and the scent of mangoes when they grow black (90) Her list is specific, textured, and wide reaching. Unlike an ethics oriented to a shared humanity, which risks reducing singularity to a common bare existence and ignoring ethical consideration of other-than-humans, the poem highlights the ethical dimensions of all the embodied, material encounters among strangers. C HERYL L OUSLEY 306 Here and Now Brand’s diasporic engagement with ecology is important because environmental considerations rarely figure in accounts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and urbanity. Nature is often scorned in contemporary critical thought as the emblem and ideological tool of essentialism, whereby historical specific practices and identities are rendered immutable or universal. But, as Kate Soper argues, the social constructionist denunciation of “nature” as a discursive obfuscation of history “can very readily act evasive of ecological realities” (23), including the ways in which environmental hazards, risks, and benefits are differentially distributed within and across nations and world regions. Any struggle for global justice or cosmopolitan ethics will be incomplete without engaging with nature and ecology both materially and conceptually. Concomitantly, global ecological struggles that neglect justice can deepen social inequalities and undermine democracy. Brand’s poems present what Bruce Robbins terms “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” - daily, often banal, experiences that position individual subjects within transnational spatial flows of people, goods, finance, pollution, images, animals, weapons, and natural materials. The singular actions of the elegiac poet in Thirsty and the late-night witness in Inventory underline how cosmopolitan ethics are not given by the circumstances of globalization. Rather, the poems offer the hopeful prospect that, despite widespread complicity in ecological loss and hazard, a stance of resistance is possible: when “everyone grows perversely accustomed, / she refuses” (Brand, Inventory 29). The basis for this refusal is the cosmopolitan subject’s commitment to the here and now, remaining emotionally open to the stranger “who comes,” to take Derrida’s phrase, whether via the television screen, in the brief and incomplete encounter on a bustling city street, or through the memory of one’s own foreign origins. “Here” is not a territory - a land claimed by the nation - nor is it a stagnant and parochial local. “Here” is one’s embodied, specific location, which is embedded in material, communicative networks of humans and nonhumans. Like the anonymous position of the television witness, “here” might be anywhere; nevertheless, it is always, ecologically, somewhere. The task for an ecologically just cosmopolitanism is to make “here” - the places we live in - actually livable for all. By defining the city and the planet as gathering points for strangers, Brand extends the diasporic and racialized subject’s sense of not belonging “here” to everyone, which becomes the tentative basis for a limited identification. When each is at some time and in some places a stranger, then an essentialist rejection or objectification of the other becomes impossible. But Brand’s poems also speak passionately for the importance of relations of intimacy, and mark the dangers of giving no value to communities or relationships that develop over time in particular places. The yearning for a sense of home or belonging the emigrant expresses in No Language is Neutral is mirrored in the deadened cityscape in Thirsty, which remains but a Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 307 temporary stopping point for those immigrants who can never feel they belong. Brand’s poems invoke the figure of the stranger not to celebrate nomadism but rather to more fully acknowledge the ethical responsibilities of global subjects. 3 3 Some of the material in this chapter was first published as “Witness to the Body Count: Planetary Ethics in Dionne Brand’s Inventory,” in Canadian Poetry 63 (Fall/ Winter 2008): 6-27, and “Dionne Brand’s Environmental Poetics” in No Language Is Neutral: Critical Essays on Dionne Brand, edited by Katherine McKittrick, Rinaldo Walcott, and Dina Georgis (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009). C HERYL L OUSLEY 308 Works Cited Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Random House, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. 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Conley, Verena Andermatt. “Chaosmopolis.” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1 (2002): 127- 38. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Norton, 1996. 69-90. Cuomo, Chris J. Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing. London: Routledge, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality.” Trans. Barry Stocker. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. Ed. Barry Stocker. London: Routledge, 2007. 237-64. Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Norton, 1996. 298-320. “Diversity.” City of Toronto. 19 Apr. 2009 <http: / / www.toronto.ca/ quality_of_life/ diversity.htm>. Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Heller, Chaia. Ecology of Everyday Life. Montreal: Black Rose, 1998. Ethics, Nature, and the Stranger 309 Jackson, Peter. “Constructions of Criminality: In Toronto Police-Community Relations.” Antipode 26.3 (1994): 216-35. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. ---. “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck.” Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 450-62. Lovelock, J.E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Nussbaum, Martha, et al. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Ed. Josh Cohen. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Plumwood, Val. “Toward a Progressive Naturalism.” Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice. Ed. Thomas Heyd. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 25- 53. “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” United Nations News Centre. (12 April 2001): 17 May 2010 <http: / / www.un.org/ News/ dh/ lat est/ drcongo.htm>. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 1-19. Sachs, Wolfgang. Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development. Halifax: Fernwood, 1999. Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Shiva, Vandana. “The Greening of the Global Reach.” Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. Ed. Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed, 1993. 149-56. Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. VI. Artists’ Forum J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba Fig. 1: Welcome to Camp Catawba. 1 I. In North Carolina, amidst a vast expanse of virgin wilderness, a curious abstraction sleeps: the remains of Camp Catawba. A small dirt road winds from Blowing Rock, population 1476, up the mountainside and onto the shoulders of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where several decrepit cabins teeter beneath the trees. The overgrowth is anything but subtle; glass shards jut from vacant window panes and doors swing like shadows from loose hinges. And yet, for all the rotting wood, it is not so difficult to imagine a place that once teemed with life. The grounds are still awash with a transcultural history that hangs over the cabins like the dense foliage, and to the conscious visitor, the story of exile and the search for home are at once conspicuous and palpable. I, Wheeler, was on the open road in mid-October driving south from Washington, D.C. toward Blue Ridge Mountains, and that alone was a beautiful thing: the sun rose and cast its golden light across the farmlands of rural Virginia and I felt the surge of excitement that comes from escape; for the coming ten days I was free from routine, family, city life, plans, futures, ca- 1 All photos of this article by Wheeler Sparks © 2008, printed with kind permission of the artist. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 314 reer. In the foothills of the Blue Ridge, I would join friend and colleague Jens Barnieck to explore the remnants of this forgotten camp, a portrait of German exile founded by a Jewish refugee during the Second World War. The story manifested many of my own sentiments as a result of expatriation, and though my personal experience with the War was only through my grandfather’s memoirs, it conjured many of the same emotions. The GPS fell into confusion as I veered off the highway toward New Market, a one street-light town, and onto the bucolic back roads of its sleepy south side. The dirt paths wound beneath a wooded canopy of autumn leaves and over pregnant hills that rose and fell in a seaworthy cadence. I found the appropriate route but would not have known so if not for the hand-painted wooden sign nailed hastily to a nearby tree trunk. Further still, the path emerged from its shady curtains onto a grassy knoll where several disconnected homesteads nestled into the hill’s slope. Here was the residence of Charles A. Miller, author of a book on Camp Catawba. As a boy, Miller had spent his summers amidst Catawba’s aged woodlands and fresh mountain streams. Earlier that year, when he introduced Jens to the Camp’s story, Miller had expounded upon his childhood experiences with professorial insight: “In Germany, did you ever come across an institution called Odenwaldschule? Catawba was modeled a bit after the reform ideas of that boarding school,” he declared. “The founder was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Vera Lachmann.” Then, yielding a more intimate tone: “We had a wonderful time there.” A pause settled over him for memory’s sake, then he continued as before, “Vera would stage plays from Aeschylus to Molière or Schiller, reciting Greek epics to the campers. We performed concerts directed by Tui St. George Tucker, a composer in residence. You may not be familiar with her name” (Miller interview). Indeed, Jens was familiar with neither Tui St. George Tucker nor Vera Lachmann, but the conversation piqued his interest. In Camp Catawba, several complex identities fused: a German poet and an avant-garde American composer who together directed an arts camp for children; an American arts camp based upon the ideals of a pre-war German boarding school; a manifestation of German exile born in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even more compelling, the camp seemed to have played an integral role in the childhood of many young Jewish immigrants. And yet somehow, despite its German roots, the camp boasted a legacy uniquely American as well. I pulled into a small clearing beside several cabins where Miller eagerly hosted Jens the previous evening. From that point, Jens and I would commence our journey southward to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 315 II. Like the rest of Germany’s Jewish population at the brink of the Second World War, Vera Lachmann, a young, overqualified school teacher, was uncertain about the future. In 1932, she earned a PhD in classical languages from the University of Berlin and had hoped to teach at the university level when the environment for Jews in Germany suddenly and drastically changed. For the following six years up until the war began, Vera abated her anxiety by establishing a school for children excluded from public education because they were Jewish. “We first picked up children from the street,” she recalled. “’We’ was a group of like-minded friends, partly ‘Arian’ and partly Jewish, who taught those unwanted children in our small rooms.” Growth in the school was intentionally averted to dissuade prying eyes, so the clandestine institution comprised about 65 children and a handful of teachers who worked for free. “But we drew joy from it,” Vera noted (interview). Rather than giving up their ambitions all together, some intellectuals chose what German author Frank Thiess called “inner emigration,” a term used to describe those who felt obligated to stay in Germany despite, or perhaps in spite of abject sentiments for the regime. In surges of pride, Vera reasoned with her fate. “I thought, ‘I belong here, thus I will stay.’ It was foolish,” Vera admitted she stayed dangerously long in Nazi Germany, the reasons for her continually postponed exodus being “too great a love for Germany and the German language, and an inborn stubbornness” (interview). Though she weathered the storm for some time, eventually she fled the land of her birth and, alongside thousands of others, made her way to the Purple Mountains’ Majesty. III. It was early in the evening when we pulled into Boone, Blowing Rock’s northern neighbor. Breezes carried the coolness of summer faded and the air was changing alongside the leaves. The rolling hills of Appalachia left us slightly punch drunk; for hours we were served a steady visual feast of fertile farmlands and green pastures pockmarked with peaceful livestock, wooden fences, and iconic homesteads. The sweeping landscapes were distinctive, and the broadside of a paint-chipped barn proselytizing ‘Jesus Saves’ reminded me that this part of the country is a world all its own, full of cultural peculiarities. On the outskirts of Boone, we traversed an overgrown farm road, hoping it lead to David Sengel’s farmstead. The light was soft and the colors of the surrounding valley had just begun to shine under the setting sun. From the main highway, we crossed several hillsides in search of our turn when, at the J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 316 far end of the road, we noticed a man standing in the sun where the pathway bent almost backwards, watching us. His tassled hair, matted down by an old red baseball cap, hung with his burly cinnamon beard over the better part of his conspicuous lime-green tshirt. His pants were baggy, worn and dust covered, his shoes loosely tied. He gazed inquisitively at us, and his dogs barked as we drove slowly over the hillside again and again. We had no idea where we were going and this much must have been clear to him. Eventually, he motioned us over and we rolled down the car window. I leaned slightly forward to read the shirt under his woolen beard: ‘Fog Likely Farm.’ He greeted us, his eyes at once jovial when we mentioned Chuck Miller. With that, our problem was solved: here beside a sharp turn in the road, slightly disheveled yet surrounded by a well-kempt farm, lingered David Sengel himself, piano tuner of Camp Catawba in a time gone by. With a warm smile, he sauntered away, ushering us down a gently sloping driveway until we reached a patch where the grass was well-worn in the pattern of tire treads. We parked the car and followed him down the hill toward his beautiful, rustic home. Fig. 2: David Sengel at his workshop in Boone, North Carolina. When the camp was active, he served as piano technician for the camp’s music program. Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 317 IV. Helene Herrmann, born in 1877 and assassinated at Auschwitz in 1944, was one of Vera’s role models from Germany. A colleague of Vera’s from the university and co-founder of the underground school in Berlin, Dr. Herrmann was deeply influenced by Stefan George (1868-1933), a poet, spiritual mentor, and luminary of the ancient Greek culture. Before the First World War, George inspired a small group of zealots to initiate new discussions about education. The German army’s defeat only strengthened his followers’ pedagogical foundations, and their teaching began to take Hellenic form. The “Georgians,” as his fervent young apostles were christened, rose to meet the expectations of their departed teacher. In fact, many are now re- Fig. 3: Morning breaks over a spectral structure that once doubled as an arts and crafts studio and the camp’s primary office. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 318 garded as beacons of light during a particularly dark period of German history. The circle included Claus Schenk Count Stauffenberg (1907-1944), a high ranking officer in the German army who lead the notorious “Operation Valkyrie,” a nearly successful attempt to assassinate Hitler, and Wolfgang Frommel (1902-1986), the author and editor-in-chief of an insurgent publishing house called “Die Runde.” The former was executed by the regime, the latter forced into exile in 1937, where he hid for three years in the apartment of Dutch painter Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht (*1912). A host of other progressive Germans sought refuge alongside Frommel, and the group, mainly young men under the age of twenty, dared not approach a window for fear of being discovered. Instead, they turned their thoughts and eyes upward, as George taught them to do, and through spiritual fervor, they managed the resolve to wait. In metaphor, they took on the name Castrum Peregrini, 2 the invincible fortress of the Templar Knights near Haifa, Israel. After the fall of the Third Reich, in that very apartment, Frommel established yet another publishing house using that same fanciful name. Vera observed Hermann’s academic fervor with wonder - “How she could tear down the curtain and introduce us to other worlds! ” (Lewis) - and never forgot the import of this quality. Later, she made it part of her own technique as she recited ancient Greek texts and poems to the boys by firelight at Camp Catawba. As Miller recounts, the young ones listening to Lachmann were inspired because she not only recited Homer well, “but embellished the tales as part of her own story” (Lewis). “Teaching became second nature and I left classes warm and very pleased,” Lachmann wrote. “Whether the students were five years old like the children at Camp Catawba or doctorate students, there is no difference.” But a peripatetic style was not the only thing Vera inherited from her didactic grandfather: “What is overwhelming about Stefan George, what drew me to him and what is still authoritative for me today, is the heartbeat of his poetry” (interview). In fact, teaching, as much as she loved it, became but a vehicle for her first love: “Writing poetry is the main thing. Everything else is like a garland around it,” she mused (interview). Long after she established her home in the United States, when the war had ended and the Templar Knights had come out from behind the walls of their literal and allegorical fortresses, Vera published three volumes of poetry with a familiar Dutch publisher: Castrum Peregrini. 3 2 The name means Pilgrim’s Castle. 3 Golden tanzt das Licht im Glas/ Golden Dances the Light in the Glass/ (1969), Namen werden Inseln/ Names Become Islands/ (1975) and Halmdiamanten/ Grass Diamonds/ (1982). All published by Castrum Peregrini in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 319 V. When we consider the suffering men have endured at the hands of other men, it gathers like a dark storm above our heads. The fatalist will say life is written out before us, we cannot elude events that come to pass because we are incapable of being anyone other than who we are. Through these eyes, the canvas of life is an abstract work, spattered with varying shades of good and evil, success and failure, joy and despair; there is no balance, there is only what is and what is not. These striking colors and deep contrasts offer the retrospective mind a broad and historical insight, but the present never ceases to crawl forward in obscurity. Perhaps thoughts such as these, heavy impressions of inevitable suffering, kept Vera awake at night. Even as she resisted her oppressors by educating the marginalized youth, her anguish grew. Sentiments toward her country, her identity, her neighbors, her culture, all once sources of pride, festered and grew increasingly burdensome. “Who dares to say that he entirely knows himself? ” she seethed. 4 And finally, mired in the heartland of a brutal empire and overwhelmed by the misery of it all, she tried to take her own life. Renata von Scheliha (1901-1967), a progressive aristocrat who also came of age in the intellectual circles of Stefan George, was Vera’s friend and confidant. 5 She thwarted Vera’s suicide attempt and made precipitous arrangements for her emigration. Though it is unclear precisely how Vera’s escape was accomplished, we know that Scheliha was strictly opposed to the Nazi regime - from the beginning, she was not a Jew but lived as one, abiding by the harsh rules enforced upon the Jewish population and undermining them where possible (Landmann 111). Scheliha’s brother, a Nazi diplomat who boldly used his position of power to enable Polish Jews to leave the country via Sweden, likely acquired the permit for Vera’s departure. 6 Shortly thereafter, in a brash display of heroism at the dawn of the Holocaust, he also arranged for documentation of the atrocities to be smuggled to Great Britain. Eventually, he 4 “Delphi Heute/ Delphi Today,“ read by Vera Lachmann on a CD compiled by Charles Miller. Published as “Delphi Heute/ Delphi Today” in Halmdiamanten / Grass Diamonds. Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1982 (10-11). 5 In the Georgian vein, von Scheliha, one of the first German women to become a successful scholar, studied the classics, committed herself to considerable research on Homer, and widely published her work. The latter earned her the nickname “Miss Socrates” from fellow intellectuals. 6 When talking to Gabriele Kreis, author of the book Women in Exile, Vera Lachmann relates in 1980: “Luckily I had a friend, who managed to get a visa for me, when the quota had long been exhausted, and so I came to the USA via Sweden in 1939 with the Gripsholm from Gothenburg.” <http: / / www.lesbengeschichte.de/ Englisch/ bio_lach-mann_ e.html> (accessed 5 Aug. 2010). J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 320 was caught and hanged for his supposed espionage, 7 one of many tragedies in an era of profound suffering. With Scheliha’s encouragement, Vera was persuaded to take flight, from her own midnight and that of her homeland. She drifted over the Atlantic Ocean in the realm of angels and birds, and by the golden light of morning surveyed her new home: the endless coastlines, the expansive plains, the towering cities. The landing gear jostled on the runway and a flood of new emotions surfaced. “I was not at all prepared for the elegance of the colleges to which I came,” she recalled, “nor to the culture of smiling” (interview). Though the war continued, both in Germany and the hearts of its people, in Vera’s written word and in her hopes, hers was a land of peace. VI. Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian-American author, often addresses the identity enigma that surfaced as a result of her emigration. Her words capture well what must have been Vera’s sentiment as she left Germany: “I think constantly about my life and about lives of others,” she wrote, “about lives that I never had and will never have. I see the facts in my life and then I see endless variations. It is like a puzzle and by removing one part, one changes the overall entity” (Weingarten 127-28). 8 This begs an important question: Who do we become when separated from our homes? Or perhaps just as relevant: Who will our children become if they have no immediate connection to their homeland? Indeed, a boy born in America to German parents is both fully German and fully American. In the absence of the motherland, a new identity is conceived. By definition, the old identity will slowly fade if not actively explored. For this reason, only by conscious choice can we understand our past in a manner that influences our present identity. In the words of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, “One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort” (Fragments 24). For the immigrant, these anachronisms, the lives of ancestors or the peculiarities of cultural heritage, may never seem entirely relevant in the present day. Tradition at first seems to be diluted by the presence of new cultures. At the supermarket or on the subway, at Carnegie Hall or in the classroom, we are challenged constantly by human interaction; sometimes we are changed markedly, other times imperceptibly, but an interaction with conflicting ideas and practices requires us to consider who we are by nature, thereby forcing us to reevaluate the foundations of our identity. 7 See in this context Ulrich Sahm’s book Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942, in particular 241-253 and 271-283. 8 The original article is in German. Translation by Jens Barnieck. Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 321 The frequency and randomness with which these contact points occur, and the force with which they are capable of impacting our lives, quickly remind us that man does not control the events that mold him. He is curiously poised between the jaws of fate, just as the earth spins unassisted on a delicate axis. Some people actively seek out points of interaction, like explorers on an internal journey, vying for the betterment of self and their fellow man. Others, like Vera, are forced from their homes and so must embrace the unfamiliar as a refuge. The concept of clashing cultures has fascinated scholars, novelists, filmmakers 9 and artists for ages. Friction makes life interesting and as globalization looms over the world’s peoples, these collisions play an increasingly significant role. “Transculturation breathes life into reified categories,” writes anthropologist and historian Fernando Coronil, “bringing into the open concealed exchanges among peoples and releasing histories buried within fixed identities” (xxix). . The story is not unfamiliar to the Greeks themselves, who helped immortalize an avian image that portrays the beautiful though painful process of destruction and rebirth. In light of the circumstances that surrounded Vera’s exile, as she was forced to leave her homeland and as her burrow was engulfed in flames, she doubtless hoped against all odds that a new life would emerge from the ashes with a plumage every bit as fair and gold and scarlet as the great wings of her past: “Oh guard what is […] and what was,” she warned in her poem “Catawba” (Catawba Assembly 229). 10 While there is no easy solution for the exile’s grief, Vera never allowed herself to withdraw in self-pity: she was now a “seeker, groping into the right self” (Halmdiamanten 11). She had not always been a poet, though she had always loved languages and the classics, but in the absence of her home, her verse became both a sustained memory and a living hope. Through poetry she began to express a growing sense of duty to live on, to endure her rite of passage; she expressed her obligation to persevere. Ruminations on the motherland filled her poetry, always written only in German, even long after she integrated into American society. “I find it difficult [to write poetry in another language],” she mused. “It only comes out in German” (interview). “Terra Renata,” or “Land Reborn,” was her first poem, written October 6 th , 1939, the day she stepped onto foreign soil (Landmann 115). Terra Renata Vom domespfeiler stieg ein engel nieder, Dass er nicht schwert noch lilienzweig mehr trage. 9 Philip Bohlman, in his article “The Music of Jewish Europe,” gives us an example in this regard by referring to The Jazz Singer, a film about the conflict between musical style and family identity in an immigrant Jewish family in New York City (98). 10 “Catawba” was first printed in “Namen Werden Inseln/ Names Become Islands (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1975). Here quoted after the version in Charles A. Miller’s A Catawba Assembly (229). J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 322 Er trat mit fremdem gruss in unsre tage Und hüllte schlicht die jünglingskühnen glieder. Im liebeszorne hob er auf die klage Um dies entseelte land, und fluch dawider, Auf dass in fronten, flaggen, siegeslieder Sühnend der reine blitz der höhe schlage. Wir waren sinnig in den tod verloren, Als seiner stimme tief geläute mahnte, Nicht von des geistes ritterschaft zu wanken, Dem schönsten sang durch längsten dienst zu danken, Dem freund uns anzutraun, der bebend ahnte, Einst werde neu aus uns das Reich geboren. 11 Miller includes a poignant analysis in his book: [Renata] has the Latin meaning ‘rebirth.’ Vera had been struck by a myth from the sixth century A.D. about Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the patron of drama. According to the myth, the child Dionysus was torn to pieces and swallowed by the Titans. For this act, Zeus smote the Titans with a thunderbolt and from their ashes created man. Man is thus part Titan and part child-Dionysus. Vera extended the Dionysos myth metaphorically to her hopes for a rebirth of Germany […]. In her distress at the destruction of Germany during the war, Vera prayed for a Germania renata, or a Germany reborn. The new Germany would be a land of philosophy and culture. (Catawba Assembly 8) In the United States, Vera first called her summer camp “Camp Rena,” an anecdote that enforces Miller’s words and also illuminates a secondary meaning in her poem. The word is reminiscent not only of Lachmann’s life before German exile, but also of her indebtedness to Renata von Scheliha. Perhaps then we can assume a greater understanding of the poem’s final image: “We were almost lost, full of death and without thought, when the deep chime of his voice admonished us never to abandon life’s dignity, but […] to confide in the friend who senses with a tremble that, one day, a new empire will be born of us all.” 11 “A Land Reborn/ From the cathedrals’ parapet, an angel descended,/ no longer carrying sword nor wearing lily blossoms./ He entered our days with a foreign greeting,/ his regal body now covered in simple clothes./ In love’s wrath, he removed both lament and curse/ from that country with no soul,/ so that lightning from above would strike/ the men of arms as an atonement, destroying their flags and proud war hymns./ We were almost lost, full of death and without thought,/ when the deep chime of his voice admonished us/ never to abandon life’s dignity,/ but to give the most beautiful singing the longest praise,/ and to confide in the friend who senses with a tremble/ that, one day, a new empire will be born of us all.” English translation by Jens Barnieck and Wheeler Sparks. While Lachmann did not approve direct translation, she often hired a former camper, Spencer Holst (1926-2001), whom she highly appreciated, to translate her work using prose (see interview with Vera Lachmann). With respect for the wonderful work of Holst, we have made every effort to honor his style of translation in our translation of this poem into English. Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 323 VII. The ceilings hung low and the floors creaked as we crossed the threshold into the den, a warm room with curious knick-knacks cluttering the windowsills. David Sengel pointed here and there, meekly disclosing improvements he had made by hand: additional rooms, walls, windows, central heating, electrical wiring; several decades ago when David and his wife purchased the foreclosed home, it was a hollow casing nestled into ample tracts of land and filled with a charm age only can bestow. Now, across from the front door, on a yellow bookshelf hefty with vinyl records, how-to books and anthologies of American folklore, the voices of NPR murmured from an old radio, proof that David succeeded with his electrical endeavors. Fig. 4: Camp Catawba’s Mainhouse. View from the assembly area. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 324 Our footsteps thundered noisily through the silent wooden halls and we climbed the stairs to our rooms. I entered timidly as David, in an unassuming tone, continued to reveal his handiwork; his furniture was carved by hand, including a magnificent cradle, a recent gift to his children, now parents themselves and only home on occasion. His words were careful and few. He seemed to be a man with much on his mind, spending his time ambling over his land to the lake he dug by hand, walking through the orchard he planted the previous fall, or woodturning in his toolshed. He glowed subtly in these contexts with a light I imagine one might have glimpsed in the face of the American transcendentalists; as with Emerson or Thoreau, every step for David was a commune with nature, as though he were, at that very moment, beholding it for the first time. “For many years a grizzled but cheerful piano tuner repaired [the piano] in the summers, testing his work with The Tennessee Waltz,” Miller recounted (Catawba Assembly 106). With that same piano tuner, grizzled now as he was then, we ate vegetables from the garden and spread homemade jam over fresh bread. During those autumn evenings, as we sat by candlelight listening to his stories, to the thrum of his wife’s banjo and the dwindling song of summer cicadas, there in David Sengel’s home, a remnant of Camp Catawba was reborn. VIII. A former student at the Odenwald-School, German-American Erika Weigand, returned to the United States from Germany and enrolled at the University of North Carolina in 1937. Several years later, when Vera made the decision to leave as well, she received pressure from Weigand to also make her home on the Atlantic seaboard. There, after years of teaching young children, Vera reaped the benefits of her doctoral degree: a teaching position at Vassar College 12 in the Hudson Valley and an extended work visa for the U.S. However, just before she left Germany, Vera experienced what she called a “prophetic dream” (interview), a lucid vision that revealed to her the location of the summer camp she would operate. The desire to start a camp for children, like so many of her aspirations, had been swept away for a time. But now in 1944, spurred by the vision, she stepped down from the bus to Blowing Rock on a foggy April morning. On impulse, she visited the local lawyer who, with providence’s hand, revealed to her a former girls’ camp on eighteen wooded acres near Flat Top Mountain. Upon seeing the property, she agreed to the price: thirty-five hundred dollars with a five hundred dollar 12 Erika Weigand helped Vera to get the position at Vassar College when Vera was still in Germany and thus helped her to get a Non-quota visa. See Helga Gläser, “Etwas Chaos ist ja Tradition…” (137). Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 325 down payment. After some deliberation, she settled on the name Camp Catawba, after the name of a fictional state in Tom Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel. The land already boasted a central building she named the “Citadel” (later used as a dormitory for boys) and a cottage that, depending on the time of year, alternated between an office and an “Arts and Crafts” building (Catawba Assembly 12). Still, she had her work cut out for her: high up on the mountainside, the lack of running water and electricity made complex difficulties of even the simplest duties. But Camp Catawba was launched in timely fashion, only a few months after her arrival there, hosting six boys that summer, most of whom were children of German Jewish refugees. She looked out over her new domain with a growing air of accomplishment, exhibiting the pride of one who endured much to realize a distant dream: The road curving upward can sometimes take away my breath, but how often did sorrow end at the sight of the home roof! In front of the tiger lilies that fold at night, two signs of peace give benediction, the two oaks whose dragon-roots are hardening with age. (Catawba Assembly 229) IX. In his first telephone conversation with Jens, Chuck Miller mentioned another name in passing, Grete Sultan, a pianist from Berlin who fled for America in 1941. 13 One of her teachers, Richard Buhlig, an American who also taught the infamous John Cage, was very influential in her life, not only to her discipline as a musician but also to her escape from Germany. After her arrival to the United States, Grete became a close friend of Cage’s and “a fixture on New York’s ‘underground’ music scene in the 1940s” (Schäfer). She performed many of his works, several of which were dedicated to her, including his Music for Piano series (1953-1958) and Etudes Australes (1974). As Cage’s sphere of influence grew, so did his circle of friends. Tui St. George Tucker was a young addition to the established group, born in 1924 in Fullerton, CA. Her mother, an Australian, christened her after the endemic bird of New Zealand, which she believed to be her daughter’s avian equivalent - always singing with a loud but mellifluous voice. Tui moved to New York in 1946 and established herself as a virtuoso recorder player and com- 13 Grete and Vera were close friends from childhood, and the former's bourgeois family owned a performance house that hosted contemporary artists like the painter Max Liebermann, composer Richard Strauss and famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. As an adolescent, Grete became an accomplished pianist with a great interest in Bach as well as contemporary music. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 326 poser. Grete Sultan helped tremendously to spread the word about her younger colleague, premiering many of Tui’s piano works. Vera met Tui through Erika Weigand and invited her to Camp Catawba (Catwaba Assembly 105). The burgeoning composer did not care for conventionality or rules, characteristics quite evident in both the music she wrote and the lifestyle she lead. It was a conservative era and Tui’s salacious red hair, not to mention an implicit relationship with Vera, dashed the boys’ minds with a worldly curiosity. “I’d never seen a woman in jeans before. She was so outspoken - I’d never heard a woman curse! ” a camper recalled. “We absolutely adored her; she was so liberated” (Treadwell 85). Eventually, Tui became the musical director of camp activities, conducting, composing or arranging music according to the needs of the children and their instruments. “Imagine Beethoven as a summer camp instructor and you have some idea of what the young boys of Camp Catawba were up against. With [...] an explosive temper that coincided with her Dionysian lust for life, Tui seared an enduring impression on the campers. The children were often elevated to musical greatness, performing such works as Bach’s “Magnificat” and Händel’s “Messiah,” and even performing at New York’s Town Hall. At least two-dozen of the boys from Camp Catawba have gone on to become professional musicians” (Jurgrau). 14 The ensemble often rehearsed outside, performing works from various eras and styles; the older campers presented budding compositions to the scrutiny of their tutor and Tui herself, influenced by her primary instrument, the recorder, pushed the boundaries of tonal music with the same wandering and chromatic, even quarter-tone harmonies characteristic of her contemporaries. The pieces for Vera’s camp were coming together, and she often wrote about the music in letters to the parents: “The orchestra, an innovation of the last two years, flourishes every noon in the living room. While I am setting the table, usually together with some volunteering campers, we are wrapped in the sounds of Mozart’s great G-minor Symphony, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, or Salomon Symphony No. 7 by Haydn. You must understand of course, that the instruments used are not those precisely prescribed by the composer; but the effect is great and has surprised any visitor at camp yet (August 19, 1956)” (Catawba Assembly 227). . 14 Robert Jurgrau quoted after the website he established for Tui St. George Tucker: <http/ / www.tuistgeorgetucker.com> (accessed 6 June 2010). Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 327 X. We crossed the forest beneath a canopy of foliage that stretched out over our heads and crunched beneath our feet. Leaves were everywhere, their veins bulging amidst the dry branches and uneven stalks. We walked from the desolate kitchen into the bushes; the verdure draped on and over the path and we walked without burden. There in the forest, it was not difficult to understand the camp’s small but lasting legacy; serenity still thrived there. Add campfire stories, striking harmonies, strange benefactresses, swimming holes and tree swings and it seems there would be enough fodder for any child’s creative cannon. But good things come and go, and the wind rustles through the leaves. Though the pillow of soft earth beneath our feet carried impressions of the forgotten camp, of a campfire burning in the glade beside the hill, the path led on until we reached a withered shanty. Long after the camp was closed, Tui died there, whether by stubborn choice or ambivalent design is unclear, and her body rested for some time before anyone found her. The floorboards were lofted on shaky beams and the surrounding brush loomed tall over the barren ground, where nature’s compost unfolded messily beneath the wooden planks. A blue tarp covered the patchy roof and the doors were hard- Fig. 5: At Camp Catawba, humanity’s reified categories seemed to have been broken down, enabling one to see more, not unlike the light filtering through this window behind the Camp’s Mainhouse. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 328 bolted shut; the scene’s only anachronisms. We approached the windows with some somberness; they were thick with dirt and grime, but through the cobwebs we could make out the dusty floor, imagining the manuscripts and dozens of Tui’s hand-printed orchestral scores scattered around the room. The local residents around Catawba had been required to call upon her with frequency and worried about her health, so they had her admitted to a local retirement home. Constantly reprimanded there for her aggressive conduct, excessive profanity or drug paraphernalia, eventually she was discharged. She called a nearby acquaintance, the whiskered farmer who once tuned her pianos, who picked her up and, at her bidding, returned her to the cabin on the hill. Perhaps a quote from one of Vera’s letters paints an accurate picture of Tui’s sentiments at the time: I feel every morning when I see the sun rise behind the hills that we should consider ourselves ever so lucky to be up here: In such a beautiful green, cool spot where the rhododendron is just starting to bloom, with a wonderful group of young unselfish workers, a most interesting and lively (at times overlively) group of children, and musicians who play Bach and Handel at night as if they had been practicing all winter long, although they just met three days ago. (Catawba Assembly 36) At the rest home, Tui had become such an inconvenience that the staff’s only solution was to offer her command of an isolated room with a piano. Her curmudgeonly ways seemed to be a reaction to her unpleasant confines; the dull white walls of her asylum must have been drab in comparison to the wooded canopy of leaves about her cabin. She was a capricious woman, whose scalding anger poured with relentless fury, yet whose honest remorse resounded with a healing plea. The staff soon found that whenever she had been at the piano, she was far more willing to cooperate. Faced with this conundrum, the home maintained video documentation of her activity, especially on the occasions when she acted abusively. In one of the videos, Tui dawdles about with senile charm, looking this way and that, talking about inconsequential things. The staff asks her questions about her behavior, so she demonstrates the manner in which she allows her fingers to stroll aimlessly over piano keys: “They go wherever they want to go. It soothes me,” she says with a tired drawl. Then, she depresses the keys, the hammers tapping lightly on the strings; soft chords resonate across the white empty walls and roll over one another in sustained gestures of dissonance and consonance. She plays for a moment, then stops. Her face assumes an expression of clarity and her wondering eyes fix on the camera: “Music is my home,” she says, “I live in it” (Tucker video) . . Between Two Worlds: A Time at Camp Catawba 329 XI. We woke before dawn and ascended the hill to Camp Catawba, which now rests under the auspices of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation. As the remains of night scattered from the trees, we arrived to an isolated dell. There, as we stood cold and quiet in the clearing, the morning whispered Vera’s words: In a threatened, anxious world This glittering peace! The greenness - of the summer branches, The velvet of the grass, the windmoved dances of the leaves - Are all different from one another. Bird call that holds the stillness together. The quiet, cooly moved Is sunned-through, stirring, You can hear the quiet And the morning wind Which does not want to disturb the trees. 15 15 Vera Lachmann Early Morning in Catawba from: Four Catawba Poems, edited as private, limited compilation by Charles A. Miller, 1985. Not for sale. The poems can be found in Fig. 6: Light breaks over the assembly area, where children gathered around a campfire to hear stories. J ENS B ARNIECK AND W HEELER S PARKS 330 Vera’s goals seem simple, yet her conflict expressed something in us both - the inability to preserve the past and the desire to know what the future holds. Wisdom only comes in time and with age, as retrospection lends a greater hand to the worries of youth. So like Vera, we must not be confined by what we do not know. Instead, we embrace winds of change, though the gusts may appear to lead far from heart or home. We take our home with us, and elements of it remain long after we have lost or forsaken its nearness. A friend of Vera’s from Germany, once a cook at Catawba, wrote it thusly: “I heard the rustle of the pine trees. I understood that here one could bury the searing homesickness. […] May Catawba live serenely as before, a refuge for us wanderers between two worlds” (Catawba Assembly 85). With these thoughts in mind, Jens and I cherished the last few moments. The sun warmed the remains of an autumn chill, and Camp Catawba glistened in the dew. I took a deep breath, then we climbed into the car. It was back to Germany for him, and back to Texas for me; back to the world each of us had, if only for a few days, left behind. And as we drew from the haven, I decided it was fair to say we knew Vera Lachmann. We breathed the same thin air and crossed the same woolen turf; the same mountains still loomed beside her legacy, and the same cabins still teetered amidst the rhododendron. The dirt path crunched as the car drew from the camp, and in the back of my mind, I imagined things as they once had been: Vera prepared for story a few minutes before the telling by reading the Greek to herself from a badly worn Homer. Then a cry rang out: ‘Story on the hill! ’ - or on the porch, in the living room or later in the front room of the Citadel when the boys were in their pajamas. The boys gathered …, and the entire staff with them... They listened enraptured as Odysseus hugged the belly of a sheep to smuggle himself from the cave of the Cyclops, as Herakles (Vera never referred to him with the Latin name Hercules) cleaned the Augean stable, Zeus sent a dream to Agamemnon, and the gods feasted on Olympus. And they went to bed in suspense as Vera ended the episode, ‘And that is all I’m going to tell you tonight.’ (Catawba Assembly 175) Collection 214. Camp Catawba - Vera Lachmann Papers, W. L. 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