Literature and the Peripheral City

Jason Finch, Markku Salmela, L. Ameel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137492883
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The contributors to this collection explore literary urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents and numerous cities.

Part I
City Peripheries

1

Detroit and Paris, Paris as Detroit

Jeremy Tambling

On 18 July 2013, Dave Bing, Democrat mayor of Detroit, officially filed for Detroit’s bankruptcy, on the advice of its bankruptcy lawyer, Kevin Orr, who had been put in charge by Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder. Orr wanted to sell off the contents of the Detroit Institute of Arts, founded in 1885, as the city’s assets. Can a city be peripheral? Perhaps one which has lost its motor-industry, which gave it its twentieth-century character, can; General Motors and Chrysler both filed for bankruptcy in 2009. In 1920, Detroit was America’s fourth most populous city, after New York, Chicago and Philadelphia: Motown’s auto industry then accounted for 47 per cent of the workforce. At its peak, its population was over two million; now it is 713,000.

The image of a bankrupt city inherently redefines the peripheral, which is the theme of this book, but does so also because the city is an instance of an emptied city centre, apparently 40 per cent of it vacant, unable to pay its debts, while the white middle-class population lives in wealthy suburbs outside (Troy in Oakland County to the north-west, or Dearborn in Wayne County to the southwest), in what would normally be considered the periphery. Reasons for the city’s failure include the relocation and collapse of its auto industry, the extraordinary race-relations which ghettoized black workers within the city centre and produced riots in 1943 and 1967, and the foreclosure on mortgages that signalled America’s debt crisis in 2008. Ghettos historically might have been contained within centres, walled spaces within, as in Venice, or in Warsaw; in America, they were first defined as areas of voluntary first settlement, before the population was assimilated, but American cities have permanent black ghettos: that in Chicago’s South Side numbers 400,000 to 700,000 (see Hargreaves 67–8; Wacquant).

One instance of commercial disinvestment in Detroit comes with the move of shopping centres and department stores from the centre to the suburbs, completely so in 1984, leaving blacks, poor, and the elderly unable to go to the suburban shopping centres, especially in the absence of public transport (Darden et al. 26–8). Mark Binelli’s recent book on Detroit says that 30 per cent of Detroit, 43 square miles, is now vacant land (20). Centres become peripheral, or marginal music becomes central when American techno music takes over abandoned factory buildings in downtown Detroit, in a new filling of empty spaces, just as such music took over the abandoned buildings of Berlin, such as the Jewish-owned Wertheim department storehouse, known as “Tresor,” which being in no-man’s land, and a relic from 1939–45, were left without ownership when the Wall came down. There is an irony in the idea that a city which built cars, which permitted the expansion of the centre via freeways, and of the periphery, enabling people to live further out, in a disengagement from the centre, could go under; that its prosperity could also lead to its destruction. There is another irony since the car is the most significant object of consumption in the twentieth century, the commodity fetish in itself, even on display in rich shopping malls, the successors to Walter Benjamin’s arcades. The object of consumption lays waste to the city that produces it.

If a major city can go bankrupt, in contrast to its suburbs and to the state of Michigan, the distinction between centre and periphery has lost its value: nonetheless, though the periphery’s place may change, the idea does not; in Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, whole countries and zones can become peripheral. There are core states and peripheral areas (not states: areas with no autonomy, or a low degree of it) in a one-world system; and there is the semi-periphery, meaning countries between the two, benefiting, or not, from unequal exchange relations. In colonialism, some countries remain peripheral, in terms of what is wanted of them, some remain integral, as Latin America did to Spain, providing gold and silver, in contrast to the East Indies, providing only rich trades, such as spices, silks, and muslins. Now Spain has become a “peripheral” country of the Eurozone, along with Italy and Greece. In the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro was on the periphery, as the title of Roberto Schwarz’s book on the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839–1908) indicates: A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism. Brazil, and Rio, supplying raw goods, coffee and sugar, to the North American and European markets, is a peripheral society, but Rio was the capital of the only Empire in the Americas (1822–89), in love with European ideas and culture and liberalism and enlightenment, but actually slave-owning (until 1887), and a society dependent on favours, patronage and clientelism. This can be examined through Machado’s novels, such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written in a style recalling Sterne, who, giving so much to Joyce, as to Queneau and Perec, is the writer through whom city-experience may be textually realized. Another Machado novel, Quincas Borba, shows Rubiao, a schoolteacher from an inland peripheral town, Barbacena, coming to Rio with a fortune, left him unexpectedly. Like Machado’s family (Machado’s father was the grandson of slaves), Rubaio is an agregado, an adjunct, or retainer in a rich family. In one extraordinary chapter, number 47, Machado remembers two blacks being hanged in the centre of Rio (Assis 62–5). This is the repudiation of the apparent liberalism and enlightenment of the city, now independent of Portugal, and dreaming of Paris, and London (Assis 30). Eventually Rubaio goes mad and fantasizes that he is Napoleon III, in a dream of power recalling Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. This shows that the periphery, if Rio is that, like Lisbon in Eça de Queirós’ novel The Maias (1888), is not simply geographical, spatial: it is temporal, since different times prevail in the periphery, making it anachronistic. When Borges, whose “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” recognizes the peripheral nature of being a Latin-American writer, says, in “Borges and I,” that “I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity . . .” (324), that is not necessarily a change of subject: peripheral parts of the city play games with time.

A periphery has a double, and contradictory sense: it carries a load, while it is deemed of less importance, presumably, to what is central: it associates with what is “marginal.” This concept derives from a 1928 work by the Chicago urban sociologist Robert E. Park, for whom the margins were the marches, the borderlands. “Marginal” changes from being an adjective to a noun, the marginal being contrasted with the exclu, the excluded: one being a transitory state, the other a definitive one (Merriman 4). Yet the geographical sense of the peripheral may be more a description of modernity, where past and present can be thought of together, than what the anthropologist Marc Augé calls “supermodernity,” where everything has been taken to excess, and which produces “non-places,” such as transit-areas, and transit-camps, and transit-lounges and motorways and interchanges as well as hotel chains and refugee camps and supermarkets. Augé argues that non-places are “spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which do not integrate the earlier places.” Place acts in contestation with non-place: “the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed.” Instead of centres and peripheries, “non-places are the real measure of our time” (Augé 86, 63, 64). Non-places are the antithesis of the utopian possibilities seen in Foucault’s “heterotopias.” One example of them are “estates,” public housing for the poor, replacing earlier working-class districts; utopias only in the sense of being planted nowhere, except on the periphery; another is refugee camps, of which, according to Michel Agier, “there are now over 1,000 camps in the world, where at least 12 million refugees or displaced people live” (267); including half of the total population of Palestinians: in Balata outside Nablus, or in the blockaded Gaza. As for ghettos, places for social exclusion, it may be right to follow Manuel Castells and to think of them, along with refugee camps, as forming a Fourth World (qtd in Hutchison 321–2).

If peripheries exist or are imposed by centres of power, the double meaning of the periphery – that it holds the centre in place, but also that it is not important – is constant. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views of the city, artists depicted it from the point of view of the periphery, the outside being the point from which to view the city’s monuments, these being defining for the city: the cathedral, the seat of government, the central marketplace. If we consider Benjamin’s title, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and consider the capital as where the nation’s values are represented, made spectacular, and then replace “capital” by “centre,” then everything else becomes peripheral: the centre needs spheres of non-self-representation, in order to constitute itself. Now, more than ever, the centre is architectural, and, as with the Eiffel Tower, architecture no longer signifies beyond itself; architecture is for the “exposition” or Exhibition. It has the dual function of inscribing the city in a particular mode, controlling the movements of its population, being always tendentially panoptical, to follow Foucault, creating subjectivity by representing itself and acting as a metaphor for how the city, or the nation, wants to present itself, as for instance, in images of transparency (see Hamon). Architecture, the marker of a centre, opposes itself to building: the suburbs are not architectural; in France they are the banlieues, defined in 1694 as “the stretch of a league or thereabouts around a town”; this referred to how far a “ban or proclamation,” administered separately from the city, would reach (Merriman 232). Matthew Taunton says that the word shares the same root as bannissement, so giving the sense of banishment, of being outside the law, and having the sense of being a waste land, unlike the English or American suburb (98). Etymologically speaking, a faubourg is de furis, that is, outside, the “bourg,” what is “fors,” a word which Derrida has exploited, or “hors”. In which case, the faubourg would be like that which is the hors d’oeuvre, outside the work, and with the force of the parergon, questioning what is inside.

An alternative etymology makes the faubourg the faux bourg, the false city, which disparages it (Merriman 19). The faubourg was associated with the working class, as with the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which Dickens uses in A Tale of Two Cities. Saint-Antoine had been outside the fourteenth-century walls, but had been part of Paris since 1702 after the old ramparts had been pulled down in the 1680s, confirming the pattern that made the centre residential and the faubourgs places for work activities. It was enclosed by a new wall, constructed in the 1780s to collect the octroi taxes for goods coming in, payable to the Fermiers-généraux at the barrieres. The districts beyond were annexed in 1860 as part of Baron Georges Haussmann’s rationalization and rebuilding of Paris in the Second Empire (1851–70). They made twenty arrondissements, adding to those which had been created in 1795. The annexation doubled the city’s area and increased its population by a third (Ferguson 133, 115–51). Paris in 1801 had been a city of 547,800; in 1861 it had 1,696,100 residents, and just under two million by the end of the Second Empire (Pinkney 151). This compares with Berlin, a new capital, which in 1801 had 200,000 inhabitants and by 1900 two million, gaining 500,000 in the 1890s alone, and London, which, mid-century, had passed the two and a third million mark.

There had been new cities before, such as St Petersburg, which by 1865 had a population of 539,000, and American cities, which were not troubled at their inception by questions of history and so could build on a grid-plan, with reference to the New Jerusalem: “and the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth” (Revelation 21.15). But no one had attempted to refashion an entire city before Napoleon III and Haussmann. Priscilla Ferguson compares Washington DC and Paris: “if Washington is the city of the republic, Paris is the city of revolution” (31). As such, Paris is contested space; the narcissistic drive that rebuilt so much of it in the Second Empire – which Zola images in the incest of The Kill (La Curée, 1871), showing the money to be made out of speculative building in the 1850s and 1860s – displays an intention to make it all at the centre, and to extend that centre outwards (see Bell 57–95). As the city of revolution, Paris had to be the capital of the nineteenth century, having virtually no competition, and because it was a place for contestation, first for space, on account of a perception that class and geographical position are essential to each other, and for political representation, making it the space definitional for “modernity.”

Paris remains the city whose nineteenth-century developments remain decisive, though other cities have set their mark on literary texts: Berlin for Fontane, after 1871, shows itself as a centre of bourgeois values and Prussian conservatism, and before Fontane, it was so, implicitly, for Hoffmann; Madrid and its history is essential for Galdós, and St Petersburg cannot be summed up adequately without discussing what this most “abstract and intentional” city means for Gogol, or Dostoesvsky, or Bely (see Garland). New York is essential for Melville, and I have discussed in my Lost in the American City how much American cities constructed Dickens, colouring his sense of London. Yet not even in Dickens is there a primary sense of space being contested; Dickens’ London seldom records politics; and though he is fascinated by the opening up of the railway from Euston station in Dombey and Son, Dickens’ London is neither concerned with the new spaces of capitalism that the Arcades Project is preoccupied with, nor in marking historical happenings. In Dickens there is no Chartist London, no Trafalgar Square, no Great Exhibition, no recording of the changes implied in the embanking of the Thames. His is a more uncanny city, more strangely familiar, not distinguishing between centre and periphery, being too interested in establishing connections and coincidences to do that, so it ranges more widely over London than Balzac or even Zola do with Paris. As the city after Dickens’ death (1870) becomes more imperial, reflected in such an artist as James Tissot, so it brings poverty into representation, as with Gissing, and the East End, as with Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. But there are no revolutionary energies in telling a middle-class readership what things are like in the centre, the “inner city” (a term for which OED gives 1968 for a first citation), while knowing that the middle class have dispersed themselves, via the railways, to the suburbs. That differentiates London and Paris, and associates with another issue: the place given to the house in Britain and to the apartment nearly everywhere else. The apartment provides strange meetings in Balzac’s or Zola’s or Perec’s Paris, whereas in Dickens, the street does that. The London suburb and the Parisian banlieue are different things, at least until after the Second World War (see Jackson).

Henri Lefebvre discusses what happened in Paris, and I summarize him thus: in nineteenth-century Paris before the Second Empire, and before Haussmann, the Paris of Balzac, there was less class differential measured by geography; in the city, there are “meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge,” where, however, “urban democracy threatened the privileges of the new ruling class,” by expelling the proletariat and destroying “urbanity” (Lefebvre, Writings on Cities 75–6). Haussmann is the instrument of this new expulsion; the Commune of 1871 shows resistance to it, and attempts a reconques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Peripherality and Literary Urban Studies
• Part I City Peripheries
• Part II Peripheral Cities, Genres and Writers
• Select Bibliography
• Index