City Images

Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film

Mary Ann Caws, Caws

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138162198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134296057
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.

1
Discourse and the City

SIPA/Art Resource. Disaster photo: Fires at the Waldorf Astoria, New York.

Who ever believed in perfection? Moments question other moments, at their best, and ours. The power is built into the narrative of politeness, and cannot be undone, except by some conflicting text.

The City: Some Classical Moments

Charles Molesworth

I start with the words of a Roman author; a characterization of cities, from Scipio's Dream, by Cicero: "You must know, my friends, that among all things done upon earth, nothing is more agreeable to the eyes of those who rule the universe than societies of men founded upon respect for laws, which we call cities." If we take this as our master text we can easily summarize the main significance of "the city" as the source of those qualities that we name with those city-born words, civility and civilization and urbanity. These are the hallmarks of a law-abiding society, a structure built upon a sense of respect and maintained by that respect. But also, while using this text, we must remain suspicious of its elevation, and be aware of how it speaks from "on high" and how it seeks to be definitive and exhaustive in what it describes. The fact that Cicero speaks from "on high" should also alert us to the sense of the city as a stage, in fact the place where a distinct sense of self undergoes a staging. We might even begin with a preliminary definition: the city is the stage where staging itself occurs. If, as one critic has argued, the city is the place where everything is both available and vanishing, then we can also see it as the stage in which all prosceniums are unfolding and disappearing.

Part of this unfolding and disappearing is due to what we might call the aesthetic ecology of the city. For in the urban setting we constantly confront the intersection of private and public spaces, as much of our urban experience allows public space to become the stage for private experiences and private spaces to be unfolded onto public experiences. This intersection of spaces results in large measure from the market aspect of the city, since it is the market that is especially capable of mediating private desire and public activity. There are a number of places in modern literature where this sense of the city is strikingly conveyed. Four such places will frame the following discussion: a poem by Baudelaire, a passage from Wordsworth's Prelude, a poem of William Carlos Williams called "Perpetuum Mobile: The City," and John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." In each of these passages there will be appeals to tropes of both stages and markets, and we will see that the city is both market and stage, those exemplary places where the available and the vanishing become virtually interchangeable.

The poem by Baudelaire is called "To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl" and it is in the section called "Parisian Scenes," from Les Fleurs des Mal. The poet, from circumstances equally "reduced" (as he quaintly and ironically puts it) tells the beggar girl that her vocation is not only beggary but beauty. He can make this claim because he imagines her transformed through a comparison to a queen, but a queen seen in dramatic terms:

the frail and freckled body you display
makes its own appeal-queens
in velvet buskins take the stage
less regally than you wade through the mud
on your wooden clogs.¹

Baudelaire goes on to imagine a most regal fate for the beggar-girl, but it remains a most theatrical sort of fate, complete with gentlemen sending their flunkeys to find out who owns the carriage that visits the queen, herself busy entertaining "a Bourbon or two" in bedroom intrigues. But the poem ends with the poet admitting he cannot even donate forty sous to the beggar, and must content himself with urging her to go forth with no ornament save that of her starving nakedness. The simplest way to read the poem is as an ironic reversal of the cult of beauty, a reversal which in fact can be read as a reaffirmation, since the cult of Beauty has always stressed the force of an ideal beauty that existed above and beyond mere physical details. But as we pursue the poem's irony, past Baudelaire's typical "nostalgie de la boue," past the aesthetics of decay, we find in the "stage" metaphor not only one of the organizing notions beneath the "Parisian Scenes" section but one of the poet's fundamental ways of appropriating urban experience. This experience is one of sudden revelations and concealments. In the poem immediately after "The Red-Haired Beggar Girl" Baudelaire tells us that "no human heart / changes half so fast as a city's face," and then goes on to see in his mind's eye the image of a poultry-market that used to be where now only a flea market, with its glittering junk, fills the "new" Place du Carrousel. Here it is the market rather than the stage that serves as the poem's controlling trope. But Baudelaire is constantly interweaving both tropes throughout his book, constantly showing us how all the forms of display are manifestations of desire, and as such are no sooner fully expressed than they are exhausted. Again, the available both hides and reveals the vanished, and eventually the city's buildings are turned to allegories and the poet's memories are felt to be heavier than stones, as the public and private realms are interchanged.

The enormous prestige of Les Fleurs du Mal might lead us to think that such an urban phenomenology as Baudelaire's is completely new, unlike anything that went before. But in fact a comparable sense of the city is available in the seventh book of Wordsworth's Prelude. It is in the Prelude that Wordsworth presents an extremely complex sense of city consciousness, and he does so in large measure by utilizing images of the market and the theater. These two sets of imagery might be seen as culminating and merging in the long passage on St. Bartholomew's Fair, where the availability of various phantasms becomes the norm, thus making the city the simulacrum of the entire world, catching up all the other places—such as Cairo and Babylon, which Wordsworth begins the book by placing in the context of London as the type of all cities. Part of the great energy of the city is reflected in its spectacles and markets, in both of which Wordsworth observes the presence of "imitations, fondly made in plain / Confession of man's weakness and his loves." The plain confession of appetite and imitation will return to haunt both Ashbery and Williams, and we can see how such confession is in part a staging of those human experiences. Wordsworth also remarks on the ethology of city life, and gives us pictures of Pitt the orator (adding Burke in the 1850 version) as well as the "comely bachelor / Fresh from a toilette of two hours" who delivers a most theatrical sermon. The poet nearly turns completely to satire in places, and even flirts with the tone of a jeremiad, as when he summarizes at one point:

Folly, vice,
Extravagance in gesture, mein, and dress,
And all the strife of singularity,
Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense—
Of these, and of the living shapes they wear,
There is no end.²

(11.371-6)

I would offer "the strife of singularity" as one of the key phrases in this passage and in all of Book VII, for what Wordsworth finally ends with is a sort of nightmare vision of the city as the seat of nominalism, the place where singularity reigns as the only principle of value. This vision is made more clear in the passage where he comments on the description of the St. Bartholomew's Fair:

Oh, blank confusion! and a type not false
Of what the mighty City is itself
To all except a straggler here and there.
To the whole swarm of its inhabitants:
An undistinguishable world to men,
The slaves unrespited of low pursuits.
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end—Oppression,
under which even highest minds
Must labor, whence the strongest are not free.
But though the picture weary out the eye,
By nature an unmanageable sight,
It is not solely so to him who looks
In steadiness, who hath among least things
An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling for the whole.

(11.695-712)

Here the "same perpetual flow / Of trivial objects" presents what we might almost call an epistemological challenge, for it is an "unmanageable" sight which can only be properly perceived and understood by someone who keeps "an under-sense of greatest" things. But the trivial things themselves, despite the "strife for singularity", are always threatening to be "melted and reduced / To one identity", and thus by their lack of law and meaning to serve as the instruments of oppression. Of course Wordsworth's solution to this epistemological challenge is to rely on the forms of Nature and "converse with the works of God" where "appear / Most obviously simplicity and power," as he says a few lines later.³ We can perhaps turn this formula around and say that what the city typifies is not simplicity and power, but rather complexity and the desire which can never be stilled. Indeed, two of the most curious moments in the book are those related to figures of complexity and baffled desire, namely the two "blind" men. Actually the first such figure is not precisely a blind man, but an actor on the stage who wears the sign "Invisible." He becomes the type of semantic confusion in the city, the marker of that which he cannot be, who must nevertheless declare himself in such a way as to answer a role, a social need. The other figure, an actual blind man, appears to Wordsworth like an admonishment "from another world." This blind beggar also carries a sign, a piece of paper on his chest which contains "the story of the man." This sight—the sightlessness proclaimed for all to see—becomes for Wordsworth "a type / Or emblem" of the "utmost that we know." These two figures are both the victims of city life and its emblems, since they together represent the threat of meaninglessness, as the ethos of display in urban existence turns everything into a realm of confused semantic claims. The particularity of individual human existence is distorted into an objectified world of display and proclamation whose rules are ultimately those of the market and the theatre.

The speaker in the poem⁴ by William Carlos Williams begins by viewing the city from a distance, and is able to see it as "small / as a flower", but at night he knows that the city becomes dreamlike and "more / than a little / false." The poem proceeds by a series of cubist-like views of the city, a flow of contending and patterned energies that can range from the ironic invocation of the Postal Service motto ("neither the rain nor storm can keep them") to a whimsical image of armored car guards turned robbers. But in each instance Williams' refrain is "For love!", and he sees the city as the goal of all those who recognize that "There is no end / to desire—." But near the end of the poem Williams turns to an image of cloacal waste as he imagines an eel fattening in a water pipe by feeding on the waste products of the city. It is under the sign of this scavenging appetite that the speaker points over and over to the city, shouting "There!" three times in order to express his delight at the expanse of human effort, but also to convey a sense of discovery. However, this discovery is a demystifying one, for he claims that the city lights are "hiding / / the iron reason / and stone," and the "stars of matchless splendor" are able to bring only "silence." The poem ends with a "farewell!" while the city is imagined as dwindling in the hard grey rain of a summer's day. Williams' city is one where necessity has shown itself, and while the realms of anake and eros are interlocked, the elements of display and availability are set forth as the stars, the moon, and the bright-edged clouds. These natural "apparitions" dwarf the city and set it off, like a flower on a bush, and indeed the city itself disappears when the speaker and his anonymous lover enter it. In Williams we can see the dialectic of the available and vanishing shifting toward the latter term. The city can only be turned into an aesthetic object or faced as a market place of endless desire; it is a place of perpetual movement not only for those who live in it but for those who try to "view" it from some safe and significant distance. Of course, Williams does not have access to the heavenly viewpoint that provides Cicero with his perspective, so he must supply something like the time-worn Romantic naturalism of the stars and clouds and yet undercut this framework at the same time. By dramatizing and even enacting the very problem of viewpoints, Williams does more than bring a modern consciousness to bear on the city; he makes us aware of the city as a place where no coherent perspective is possible. Wordsworth and Baudelaire act as guides to the city by moving along on a street-level and there presenting the "strife of particularity," but when these poets take flight, as it were, for the higher view of the city they must resort to either a supposed divine framework or its inversion in a kind of satanism. In Williams we have the secular city in all its unceasing movement, but that movement must be thought of as taking place both in the city itself and in the consciousness of its ever mobile observers.

In John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the ostensible subject is the Renaissance painting of the poem's title, but because of its powerful reflective energies the poem's real subject might more accurately be described as the problem of selfhood. Furthermore, the notions of selfhood embodied in the poem's complex structure are in part existential and in part a collection of decentered models of identity that are best described as profoundly post-modern. But what becomes apparent in the poem is that the notions of the self it advances and explores are even more profoundly urban in their texture and lineaments. At one point Ashbery names three cities: the Rome where the painting was executed, the Vienna where it is housed and where Ash bery first saw it, and the New York where the poem is being composed. It is New York that is called "a logarithm / Of other cities." The painting (and by extension the city) serves the poet as an emblem of how to live his life, or at least an emblem of how to conceive his own consciousness; this consciousness centers on the awareness that "the soul is not a soul," that we can never express it in words, and that "We see only postures of the dream," This search for the soul takes many forms, including the recognition that the search is fruitless, that it is condemned constantly to approach but never to take possession of the "here and now," that the surface of life may well contain all the meaning there is, and so forth. The city becomes an emblem of the painting, or the consciousness the painting is trying to teach the speaker, in many ways; but chiefly the city represents a form of what Ashbery calls "play," which has elements of the dramatic as well as the nominalistic, the acceptance that everything is both fully and undeniably itself, but that any attempt to represent this awareness inevitably betrays it. Here is the crucial passage:

Today has no margins, the event arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance.
Indistinguishable. "Play" is something else;
It exists, in a society specifically
Organized as a demonstration of itself.
There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everything with their mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or
At least confuse issues by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,
Are beside the point. . . .
It seems like a very hostile universe
But as the principle of each individual thing is
Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others
As philosophers have often pointed out, at least
This thing, the mute, undivided present,
Has the justification of logic, which
In this instance isn't a bad thing
Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling
Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result
Into a caricature of itself.⁵

Here the "strife of particularity" seems to be resolved by the logic of the undeniability of the here and now, the "mute, undivided present." But the resolution is purchased at the price of unrepresentability.⁶ The impulse to recreate simulacra of the world, an impulse explored in the seventh book of Wordsworth's Prelude, is doomed to frustration, since those "assholes" who believe in mirror games and "investing" auras fail to see that the surface is the meaning, just as the soul, by being an emptiness, is what allows for the wealth of consciousness. The city, too, is like the soul, everywhere available and vanishing, and since it allows us to see everything, it turns reality into a pageant, a pageant that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION "The City on Our Mind"
• 1. DISCOURSE AND THE CITY
• 2. COGNITIVE MAPPING: LABYRINTHS, LIBRARIES AND CROSSROADS
• 3. CHARACTER AND POETRY IN THE CITY
• 4. THE CITY AS LANDSCAPE
• 5. NEW YORK TO PARIS
• 6. CLAIMS ON THE CITY
• 7. CONTEMPORARY CITIES: TRAFFICKING AND FILMING
• 8. ENACTMENT AND LASTNESS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX