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Imagining Spaces and Places

Imagining Spaces and Places

Edited by

Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikinen, Kirsi Saarikangas


and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen
Imagining Spaces and Places
Edited by Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikinen, Kirsi Saarikangas, Renja Suominen-Kokkonen

Layout: Jari Kkel

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2013 by Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikinen, Kirsi Saarikangas,


Renja Suominen-Kokkonen and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4956-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4956-2


Table of Contents

List of Illustrations .....................................................................................vii


Plate Images...............................................................................................viii
List of Tables.............................................................................................viii

Introduction: Imagining Spaces and Places


Pirjo Lyytikinen and Kirsi Saarikangas...............................................ix

I Remembered and Sensed Spaces

Memory and Place from the Red Center of Australia to the Periphery of
Paris: To See the Frame that Blinds Us
Claire Farago..........................................................................................3

Multisensory Memories and the Spaces of Suburban Childhood in the


Greater Helsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s
Kirsi Saarikangas..................................................................................27

II Urban Spaces

Urban Imagery between Enchantment and Disenchantment


Bart Keunen ..........................................................................................57

How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early Victorian


London
Jason Finch...........................................................................................85

Making and Taming Messy Space: The Contested Nature of Historical


Space in Urban China
Philipp Demgenski..............................................................................107

III National Spaces

Cabins and National Identity in Norwegian Literature


Ellen Rees............................................................................................125
vi Table of Contents

Constructions of Space: The Literary Configuration of the English


Countryside
Angela Locatelli..................................................................................143

There in Thousands of Lakes the Stars of the Night Glimmer: Lakescapes


in Literature
Pirjo Lyytikinen.................................................................................161

IV Locations

Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives, Plantation Architecture and the


Ideology of the Romance of the South
Julia Faisst..........................................................................................185

The Cranbrook Map: Locating Meanings in Textile Art


Leena Svinhufvud................................................................................199

Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays: Painted Bodies and Ecclesiastical


Space in the Medieval Diocese of Turku
Katja Flt............................................................................................227

V Visible and Invisible Spaces

Let Us Possesse One World: Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial


Love in John Donnes Poetry
Maria Salenius....................................................................................251

The Disappearance of Gravity: Airy Spaces in Contemporary Art


Hanna Johansson................................................................................273

Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces of a Renaissance Magus


Lauri Ockenstrm ...............................................................................293

Contributors..............................................................................................319
Index.........................................................................................................322
Plates of Colour Images ...........................................................................327
List of Illustrations
12 Honey Ant Mural at Papunya School
13 Mens painting room
14 Alice Springs, Australia, Papunya Tula Gallery
15 Installation view, first gallery, Muse du Quai Branly
17 Installation view, Western Desert paintings from Australia
18 Entryway to Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition
21 Kontulankaari 1 Kaarikuja 2, Kontula, Helsinki
22 Suburb under construction in Helsinki
23 Kisakyl, Helsinki
24 Munkkivuori, Helsinki
61 Johannes Flintoes Krundalen
91 Boone Hall Plantation, Ornamental Gate Leading to the Masters House
92 Boone Hall Plantation, Oak Alley Main Entryway
93 Boone Hall Plantation, Row of Slave Cabins
101 Eliel Saarinens The Cranbrook Map
102 Exhibition of Home Furnishings in the Cranbrook Pavilion
103 Interior of Studio Loja Saarinen
104 The Studio Loja Saarinen, cover of a printed brochure 1932
105 Photograph of the scale model of Cranbrook
111 Saint Lawrence, Maaria church
112 Armless human, Korppoo church
113 A painting of a mermaid, Nousiainen church
114 A painting of a mermaid, Pernaja church
115 A painting of a mermaid, Nauvo church
116 A painting of a mermaid, Korppoo church
117 A creature with a halberd, Maaria church
118 A creature with two objects, Maaria church
135 Lauri Astalas Gamelan
136 Tanja Koponens Unsaid II
141 Planetary symbols and astrological characters
142 Planetary symbols and astrological characters
143 The Saturn and Mars on a throne with attributes and symbols
Plate Images
11 Western Desert in central Australia, Kintore
16 Installation view, interior gallery, Muse du Quai Branly
19 Emily Kame Kngwarreyes Big Yam
110 Richard Bells Big Brush Stroke
131 Axel Antass Whiteout (Fence)
132 Heli Rekulas Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht
133 Lauri Astalas Rome Drive I
134 Lauri Astalas Rome Drive II

List of Tables
51 The political history of Qingdao since 1898
141 The universal correspondences according to Athanasius Kircher
142 The seven steps of magic according to Marsilio Ficino
Introduction: Imagining Spaces and Places

Pirjo Lyytikinen and Kirsi Saarikangas

You are not in a place; the place is in you. (Angelus Silesius)1

Recently, the idea expressed by Angelus Silesius, the German seventeenth-


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

1
Quoted in Krohn 2004, 5.
x Imagining Spaces and Places

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

Space

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

to a particular location or position. (S.v. space in the Oxford English


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

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

gendered and gendering spatial practices. The ideas of users as corporeal


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

Place

Place, in turn, has been a key focus in the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, an eminent
human geographer who follows the phenomenological tradition. His
reconceptualisations of the notion of place and his ideas of a sense of
place have been highly influential in human geography and in other, related
fields. His differentiation between the terms space and place has been a
common approach in studies that put emphasis on place instead of space.
According to Tuan, what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place
as we get to know it better and endow it with value (Tuan 1977, 6). In his
distinction space is more abstract than place, but Tuan also emphasises that
the terms require each other for definition: From the security and stability
of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and
vice versa (ibid.). In Tuans view places and spaces not only engender
feelings and are shaped by complex networks of feelings, but place and
space are also intimately connected with movement and with restrictions
of movement as well. Tuan reminds us that the more abstract notion of
space usually connects with ideas of movement and freedom, whereas
place connotes not only security and homeliness, but also closure, pause
and even imprisonment. (1977, 36.)
The concreteness of being-in-place or living in places was also
emphasised by one of the pioneers of the new kind of philosophical place
studies, Edward S. Casey (1993, xv). As the ancient philosophers knew,
to be is to be in place (ibid., 14); in light of that idea Casey suggests
that it is fruitful to focus on places instead of being or beings and explore
how places constitute, modify or influence our being and how our identities
are formed in interaction with places. The spaces that every one of us is
occupying at every moment range from the room or the street to the city,
the country or the planet in a geographical sense and, in the sense of feeling
implaced, from ones home to the neighbourhood, home region, nation
and perhaps other, even more encompassing places of belonging. These
spaces and places are lived and experienced and are not just containers.
Even if they serve to implace you or to anchor and orient you, finally
becoming an integral part of your identity, as Casey (1993, 23) argues,
xiv Imagining Spaces and Places

they are also constituted by you, by your ways of perceiving them and
interacting with them. And the relationship between bodies/minds and their
spatial environment is not just natural, but also cultural: Implacement
is an ongoing cultural process that acculturates whatever ingredients it
borrows from the natural world (Casey 1993, 31). The representations of
places, themselves cultural artefacts, build on already culturally-determined
meanings given to places and bodies, and at the same time may well change
them in the ongoing negotiation between the given and the experimentally
imagined.
While both Tuan and Casey conceive place as bound to a certain
location, place can also be seen as porous. Geographer Doreen Massey,
among others, has advocated a more mobile notion of place, one that is
open to the interrelations outside it. She emphasises the relation instead
of the opposition of space and place. Massey asks where is here? and
she calls for an understanding of the world in terms of relationality and
the mutual existence of local and global in the same place. (Massey 2005,
183184.)

Landscape

An important aspect of the power of places, an aspect directly connected


to pictorial and textual representations, is conveyed by the notion of
landscape. The term landscape has a double meaning. It refers both to the
visible features of the land and to the genre of landscape paintings and the
representations of demarcated areas. It is hence both the perceived and the
lived physical environment and its visual, verbal or aural interpretation
(Haila 2006, 2327). According to art historian W. J. T. Mitchell,
landscape is already encoded with cultural values and meanings and is
best understood as a medium of cultural expression (Mitchell 1994, 14).
Landscape is hence both a human and a natural construct.
The notion of landscape also brings in the intertwinement of space and
place in the representation of places. Casey (1993 and 2002) understands
landscape as encompassing not only landscape painting or literary
descriptions of picturesque places, but also as a general term evoking
cityscapes and containing special subgenres such as waterscapes and
potentially linked to city-building, imagined communities (such as nations)
and to the construction of memorial places. What emerges from the notion
of landscape and from landscapes various cultural representations can
inspire many different approaches to the study of places. It also brings into
Introduction xv

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

Casey refers to the aspect of displacement or movement, which is often


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

Contributing Essays

By no means does the brief discussion above exhaust the multiple


perspectives on spaces, places and landscape currently being used in
the vast area of spatial studies. In Imagining Spaces and Places these
questions are approached from the perspectives of the visual arts, literature
and, in particular, urban space. The volume shows a plethora of fruitful
xvi Imagining Spaces and Places

and interesting approaches, but it would be pointless to try to summarise


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

Walter Benjamins views of modernity and urbanityand the disenchanted


and enchanted representations of urban space. The phantasmagoric and
mythical representations of modern urban space that dominate the artistic
rendering of cities emphasise the pre-rational and affective aspects in
imagining modernity and big cities. The aesthetic experiences are shown
to engender a modern counterpart to magic. Relying on Ernst Cassirers
ideas about mythical thinking and Michel Foucaults notion of heterotopia,
Keunen explores how literature articulates the ambivalences of modernity
by creating other places where bourgeois rationality is transcended. The
other two chapters in the section are case studies of problematic urban
spaces. In How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early
Victorian London Jason Finch focuses on literature that describes the
London slums. Finch traces two strands in recent work on nineteenth-
century London slums as imaginative places: the discursive or cultural and
the empirical or material. The slum writings of the period 182050 which
he discusses, by Pierce Egan, G. W. M. Reynolds, Thomas Beames and
Charles Dickens, indicate that both the cultural and the material dimensions
need to be kept in mind by those working on imaginative place. Philipp
Demgenskis chapter, Making and Taming Messy Space: The Contested
Nature of Historical Space in Urban China, looks at the transformation
of historical urban space in the old town centre of Qingdao, where rapid
processes of change are replacing historical spaces with the messy
spaces of urban modernity. The case study thus demonstrates how space
is constantly produced and reproduced by the people who engage with it.
In the third section, National Spaces, three ideologically pregnant
spaces and their historical development in the national literary imagination
are explored. Ellen Rees writes on Cabins and National Identity in
Norwegian Literature. The cabin is a central topos of Norwegian life and
literature that has been a signifier in strikingly different ways over the course
of two centuries. Rees reads the cabin allegorically as a symbolic home
for a nation uniquely positioned between nature and civilisation. Building
on the work of Michel Foucault, Rees argues that the cabin functions as
a heterotopia of compensation, a real yet simultaneously idealised place
that helps organise the nation conceptually. In Constructions of Space:
The Literary Configuration of The English Countryside Angela Locatelli
focuses on several literary texts from the Renaissance to the twentieth
century to illustrate how the English countryside has been empirically
experienced and theoretically framed. She argues that the myth of the
English countryside is strongly indebted to its literary conceptualisations.
In There in Thousands of Lakes the Stars of the Night Glimmer:
xviii Imagining Spaces and Places

Lakescapes in Literature Pirjo Lyytikinen analyses Finnish literary


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

Possesse One World: Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love


in John Donnes Poetry, the extraordinary spatial imagery in Donnes
poems gives rise to an analysis of both extremely constrained spaces and
spaces extending to infinity; the intertwining of the microcosmic and the
macrocosmic expresses a worldview that connects visible and invisible
realms. In The Disappearance of Gravity: Airy Spaces in Contemporary
Art Hanna Johansson analyses the airy spaces of recent visual art,
which problematise the representation of space as stable and substantial
and activate the viewers affective and reciprocal relationship with their
invisible, insubstantial, but fundamentally airy surroundings. The volume
closes with a chapter entitled Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces
of a Renaissance Magus in which Lauri Ockenstrm focuses on the
mindscape of magical and astrological thinking, thereby challenging our
rational habits. It sheds light on the various magical beliefs with which
learned magicians of the Renaissance constructed their spatial worldview
and illustrates the techniquessuch as rites and visual symbolsthat
were used to comprehend, control and manipulate not only the immediate
physical surroundings, but also the interplanetary influences in a vast
cosmic framework.

Imagining Spaces and Places seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue


between art history and literature studies and other fields of cultural studies
that work with the concepts of space, place and various scapes. This is a
huge area ranging from visual and textual studies to urban studies, human
geography and environmental history. The volume is based on a peer-
reviewed selection of papers presented at the conference Imagining Spaces/
Places, which was held at the University of Helsinki, 2426 August 2011.
We hope that scholars and teachers working at the intersection of cultural
and spatial analyses, as well as their undergraduate and postgraduate
students will find value in the perspectives offered here.

Bibliography

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Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington & Indianapolis:
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. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps.
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
de Certeau, Michel. (1980) 1990. Linvention du quotidien 1. arts de faire.
xx Imagining Spaces and Places

Paris: Gallimard, folio essais.


Colomina, Beatriz, ed. 1991. Sexuality and Space. Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris:
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. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1), 2327.
. 1991. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated
by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books.
Haila, Yrj. 2006. On the Enactment of Landscape. In Maisema /
Landscape, 1845. Helsinki: Kiasma.
Krohn, Leena. 2004. Tainaron: Mail from Another City. Wildside Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de lespace. Paris: Anthropos.
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Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1994. Phnomnologie de la perception.
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Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and Power,
edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 534. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Approaches to the Analysis of Built Space. In Contemporary Feminist
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Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
I

Remembered and Sensed Spaces


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

Claire Farago

The epigram by the peripatetic Lutheran-turned-Catholic physician, priest,


and poet Johann Scheffler, better known by his literary pseudonym Angelus
Silesius, that appeared in the call for papers to the conference Imagining
Places/Spaces, which later became the volume you are reading now, is highly
appropriate to the discussion of indigenous Australian artists entanglement
with the global art industry that follows here. Silesiuss one-liner, [y]ou
are not in a place, the place is in you, is fitting in the first instance because
Aboriginal identity is construed in terms of a fluid combination of space and
time that is always moving, in which personal identity is tied to a series of
places understood as events linking the past with the present. In the desert
region at the center of the continent (see plate 11), the native Australian
cosmology is in keeping with a lifestyle that may entail navigating 4000
square kilometres in a single year in search of food and water. Yet the
travelling is not undertaken solely for sustenance, because the journey is
the source of the indigenous Australian lifeworld (Lebenswelt) where
all consciousness and meaning, all sense of place and belonging, as well
as all individual historicity, are generated, in the never-ceasing movement
through space. In the second instance, Silesius is pertinent to the manner
in which Aboriginal representations of the places inside/outside become
packaged, commodified, and moved around the world.
To begin, given the precarious nature of living off the land especially
during the present era of desertification pressed by climate change, there
is the question of who controls that space. In the late 1960s, the Australian

1
This paper is an outgrowth of a collaborative book co-authored with Donald
Preziosi (2012). Portions of the text here have been adapted from this jointly
authored study; I thank my co-author for permission to excerpt my contributions
in their present form, which, like the original, benefit substantially from our joint
discussion and his critical interventions.
4 Farago

government removed several groups of indigenous peoples living on cattle


lands in the Western Desert region of the Northern Territory to Papunya,
a government relocation center established 240 kilometres northwest of
Alice Springs. In 1971, Geoffrey Bardon, a school teacher newly arrived
to the centre, encouraged his young students to paint using only indigenous
patterns and motifs. Bardon was soon approached by a small group of
initiated Aboriginal men who proposed creating their own designs based
on traditional graphic schemes. This initial exchange resulted in the
Honey Ant Dreaming mural (figure 12) Tjukurrpa, a Walpiri word that
is usually translated as dreamingsand there are many others in the 250
or so native languages of Australia. It designates the creative principle
that saturates the world with meaning, as manifested in the topography of
the land, its life forms, its law-codes of social behaviour. Tjukurrpa take
the form of inherited narratives about the creation of sacred places, land,
people, vegetation, and animals, and they comprise a complex network
of knowledge informing all aspects of an individuals life by tying his or
her existence to prior events. Upon birth, the child is considered a special
custodian of that part of his country where the mother stood when the child
first moved in the womb, the place from which his or her spirit came as his
or her dreaming. The named landscape features of this geography are said
to be created as the result of the activity of a Dreamtime hero in the distant
past (Langton 2000, 16). The ancient beings are present all around, in this
world, and their stories are the Western Desert peoples geography.

Figure 12. Honey Ant Mural at Papunya School, Papunya, Northern


Territory, Australia, JuneAugust 1971 (destroyed). Johnson, 43.
Photograph Geoff Bardon, courtesy IAD Press.
Memory and Place 5

The invention, production, and reception of Aboriginal Artitself a


problematic term given its links with notions of cultural primitivism
nonetheless raises fundamental epistemological and ethical concerns about
ways of construing both place and space, and negotiating different cultural
understandings across both physical and figurative boundaries. Such
negotiations are the subject of this essay, which weaves together indigenous
Australian beliefs with the expectations of a globalized art system in which
abstract paintings are simultaneously imagined as personal evocations of
a specific geography and as manifestations of the timeless, universal, and
enduring presence of pure artistic form. How these apparent contradictions
maintain one another in juxtaposition is the focus of my thinking about
imagined places/spaces.
To approach the problem of imagining places and spaces in such a
complex intercultural framework requires considering the entire arc of
cultural production, from the paintings point of origin in indigenous
beliefs (to which I have only partial access), to the paintings various
points of reception outside the communities in which they are produced.
The intersection of cultures now stretches across the entire globe, and
reverberates in many directions almost instantaneously. At an art centre
located in an impoverished desert community half a days journey from
the next outpost, the staff work at computers negotiating with high-end
galleries in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, and elsewhere to which they will
ship unstretched canvases painted by Aboriginal artists instructed by their
art teachers on the model established at Papunya in 1971.
The Honey Ant Dreaming story belongs to the place of Papunya, not
the relocation centre but the place where the dreamings of the Pintupi,
Luritja, Walpiri, Arrente, and Anmatyerre peoples who were sent there
by the Australian government converge. Painted on the walls of a disused
building (and later painted over by government administrators), the Honey
Ant Dreaming mural utilised indigenous drawing and painting patterns.
According to Bardons own recollections, at a time when the first individual
interpretations were materializing, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa won the lucrative
Caltex Prize in 1971 and returned to Papunya with the prize money,
there was a clamour for art materials from a number of men. Yet we could
equally say that the story began decades before Bardon arrived, with Albert
Namatjira (19021959), the first Aboriginal person to achieve mainstream
recognition as an artist, who spent his last two years at Papunya.2

2
Namatjiras first exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1938; he was awarded
the Queens coronation medal in 1953. His career ended tragically when he was
6 Farago

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

arrested and convicted for illegally supplying alcohol to Aboriginals, a victim of


the neo-colonial paternalistic government despite his success as an artist. (Johnson
2008, 719.) On Albert Namatjira, see Kleinert.
3
As Paul Carter has already emphasized. See Carter (2007, xviixviii), which also
mentions Bardons source in the writings of early twentieth-century Viennese art
educator Viktor Lowenfield. See further discussion in Farago (2009).
4
See further, Farago (1995).
5
See Munn (1973), for a groundbreaking contribution to non-native understanding
of these representational systems. An extensive body of scholarship now exists,
but for a recent contribution with further bibliography, see Ryan and Batty (2011).
Their exhibition features approximately 200 of the first paintings produced at
Papunya in 197172 by the founding artists of the Western Desert art movement. It
establishes connections between these paintings and their sources in designs made
for use in ceremony. The exhibition will begin with a massing of shields, spear
throwers, stone knives, headbands and body ornaments, early drawings collected by
anthropologists, historical photographs, and a ground painting. My thanks to Philip
Batty for this information in advance of the publication.
Memory and Place 7

Figure 13. Mens painting room, 1972, with Shorty Tjungurray working
on Water Dreaming. Benjamin & Weilogel, 2009.

Composition board, acoustic tiles, tin cans, car bonnets, as well as canvas
served as the support for these early paintings. The first paintings were not
made for sale. But soon powerful, abstract designs on a much larger scale,
still rooted in the land-based belief systems of the first peoples of Australia,
were achieving international recognition and commercial success as the
most important contribution to High Modernist art in decades. By the
late 1980s, the art movement that had begun in 1971 as an educational
programme brought new respect for Aboriginal peoples throughout
Australia and the world.6 The creation of Aboriginal art for an international
market is also poignantly paradigmatic of the modernist commodification
of (fine) art in a very specific sense: as the abstraction and extractionthe
reificationof particular visual or optical properties of actual multimodal,

6
The historical emergence of Aboriginal painting as a respected art form is far more
complex than this brief narrative can suggest: Morphy (1998) and (2007). By the
1960s, in the Northern Territory, bark painting was a well established genre within
the art industry: see A Short History of Yolnu Art, 2786, with further references,
in Morphy (2007). Personal communication with Philip Batty, 5 February 2009.
8 Farago

multidimensional, and multifunctional indigenous practices, with the effect


of making such abstractions consonant with late Modernist (Western)
artistic formalism in its contemporary globalised manifestations. The
trajectory from an indigenous understanding of identity as performative,
immersed in the land, connected to a geography peopled by ancestral
spirits, transmitted from generation to generation in communally prescribed
ways that not only discourage but ostensibly forbid innovation, to personal
interpretations of inherited stories produced as paintings for sale to an
audience of outsiders, challenge us to think about place in uncommonly
complex ways. The conundrum that Western Desert painting presents at
first sight is the possibility of artists unfamiliar with Modernist abstract
painting to succeed at making such relevant examples of it.
From a position in the middle of the Australian continent, began a
fieldwork project that paused many months later in Paris. My ex-centric
route from what was historically a periphery to a center of the contemporary
art world intentionally plays with, upon, and against center-periphery
models of artistic and cultural development. Center-periphery explanations
of cultural interaction have inevitably placed Europe in relation to artistic
peripheries elsewhere and generally replicate a colonialist, ethnocentric
worldview. While the scale of explanation variesthe center could be
Rome, the periphery Florence, or England, the Americas, Australia, and
so onthe systemic or structural principle would remain the same if the
center were Botswana, Bogota, or Beijing.
Inverting the center/periphery model, that is, utilizing it in order to
recognize the dynamically active conditions of reception, is an important
corrective but does not alter the structural principle. Alternatively, a
network of distributed knowledge practices offers a less Eurocentric (or
Sino- or Afro-centric) way to write a global history of art. Even in this
case, however, even if no centre is more important than another in the
network of modules, first there would still have to be general agreement
that the problematic notion art is a universal, pan-human phenomenon
and activity. Yet that raises other troubling questionssuch as, who is
at the table to draw up the agreement? Many First World and indigenous
peoples in numerous locations around the globe refuse the label art for
their cultural productions and object to public cultural institutions such
as museums collecting, preserving, or displaying their esoteric cultural
artifacts because they are not meant to be viewed in this manner or seen
by the uninitiated or even preserved. I am more than willing to jettison
the category of art conceived as universal and timeless in favor of
articulating how the Western ideal of (fine) art came to be applied to cultural
Memory and Place 9

productions of any origin whatsoeverand, specifically, how that now


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

the production and sale of Aboriginal art in an international market


may represent for these art centersit is the reason for their existence,
even when they are unprofitablethe artworks themselves have no other
intrinsic functions in their own communities. They might be a point of
pride, but they are also a mark of indentured servitude to a global market;
in any case, Aboriginal paintings do not furnish indigenous houses with
objects of individual contemplation or family dcor and acrylic paintings
as such serve no function in indigenous ceremonies or other tradition-
based collective practices. On the other hand, other objects initially
made for sale, such as dancing boards and clapsticks traditionally used in
ceremonies, are sometimes taken out of the commercial art centre setting
and used in those ceremonies today.7 There is, in other words, nothing that
intrinsically prevents objects made as art from having a functional value
in their indigenous context. But the acrylic paintings of dreamings have
no such use value. Aboriginal art-making communities use their livelihood
to negotiate their divided identities between two worlds. Subtle and
profound ways of worldmaking and negotiating difference are involved,
homologous to traditional ways of negotiating space and time in a harsh
desert environment. A brilliant way of coping with catastrophic change
that is neither assimilation to nor a rejection of the dominant culture, but a
strategic form of survival in a subaltern position. Resistance under the wire
managing the interstices with a measure of creativity, as Nestor Garcia
Canclini once put it regarding the intersections of tradition and modernity
in Latin America (Garca Canclini 1995, 204).
To appreciate the conundrums that contemporary Aboriginal art
presents for consideration of the art system, it is important to bear in mind
how sudden the transition has been from the traditional itinerant camping
lifestyle of hunting and gathering to a sedentary way of life. As recently as
1984, a group of nine Pintupi people who had never seen white outsiders
emerged from the Western Desert. Within three years of first contact, some
of them produced museum-quality acrylic paintings for the commercial
market.8 Acrylic paintings mark the arrival of the genius artist model of
individual artistic production and its attendant manifestation, the celebrity
artist.

7
As observed in both West and East Arnhem Land, by art historian Susan Lowish
and anthropologist Howard Morphy. Personal communication with Susan Lowish,
10 February 2011.
8
For example, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Two Boys Dreaming at Marruwa, 1987,
now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; see Kimber
(2006, 28) for a reproduction of this painting.
Memory and Place 11

Figure 14. Alice Springs, Australia. Papunya Tula Gallery, installation


view, July 2009. Photograph Claire Farago.

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

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

Figure 15. Installation view, first gallery, Muse du Quai Branly, Paris,
July 2010. Photograph Claire Farago.

And what a mystifying space I found at the top of the ramp! An even darker
space, with high ceilings hung with bright spotlights trained on amazing,
even unimaginable objects, suspended in enormous glass cases without
frames so that everything appeared to be floating in a liquid glittering
darkness above the glowing, seamless red vinyl floor that wound through
the long, deep space. The combination of darkness and reflected light on so
much glass facing in many directions absorbed the spectator. Wespectators
and displayed artifactsall became ghostly. Instantly (see plate 16).
The objects on display, looming material presences from a museological
spirit world, were raffia and wood masks, long snaky totems, a spectacular
gigantic wooden drum with animated details, abstract figures intricately
carved or dramatically painted with geometric patterns, grinning and
grimacing faces assembled in groups for no apparent reason other than
theatrical effect. Enormous creatures in lively poses gestured in some
Memory and Place 13

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

Figure 17. Installation view, Western Desert paintings from Australia,


Muse du Quai Branly, Paris, July 2010. Photograph Claire Farago.
14 Farago

One of the only educational panels in the display focused on the Swiss
surrealist artist/ethnographer Karel Kupka, highighting his prescient interest
in the indigenous material beginning in the late 1950s, thus confirming that
the objects on display might be considered Art of an unorthodox modernist
variety. Kupka went on a series of expeditions to Arnhem Land in northern
Australia in 1950s and 1960s collecting for the Ethnographic Museum in
Basel and the Muse National des Arts dAfrique et dOceanie in Paris,
the predecessor to the Quai Branly along with the Muse du lHomme.
There was nothing in the museum wall text about the Romantic labeling
in Kupkas book Dawn of Art (1965), and certainly no discussion of the
way that his late-blooming evolutionist paradigm had deeply offended
and antagonized Australian anthropologists. Nor was there discussion of
the continuous contact of Australians with Europeans, documented since
1803 in the case of the Yolngu of Arnhem Land whose recent and historical
objects were installed nearby without distinguishing labels.9
The uncanny assemblages of contemporary paintings and sculpted
objectssome of which had been made purely for the art market, others
of which were more traditional objects such as hollow log coffins that
had had actual funerary functionswere set next to a bank of windows
painted to look like a rainforest, serving as the setting for functionally fake
ethnographic objects that had been made within the last two decades for the
commercial art market by contemporary artists, many of whom were well
known names to collectors of Aboriginal art.10
When the museum first opened in 2006, at least one Australian curator
had called the display a stunning example of regressive museology.11

9
On the documentation of Yolngu contact with Europeans, see Morphy (2007,
56). Swiss artist Kupka presented his research for a doctorate in anthropology at
the University of Parisessentially a documented catalogue and ethnographic
contextualization of Yolngu works. Anthropologists who objected to his book
positioning Aboriginal art at the dawn of human history include Ronald Brendt,
W. E. H. Stanner, and A. P. Elkin. Morphy writes that all of these believed in the
visual power of Aboriginal art, all were interested in the role of the individual artist
and concerned to attribute works to particular artists. This was (and still is) the
revisionist antidote to treating ethnographic objects as the (timeless) production of
collectivities.
10
The building, designed by internationally celebrated architect Jean Nouvel, had
included a living wall on the other side of those windows, but an inadequate
support system for the plant roots, irrigation, and drainage problems compromised
some of the vegetation. This is presumably the reason why what remained for
everyone to see on the inside was a fake painted forest.
11
Bernice Murphy, co-founder of the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art and
Memory and Place 15

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

currently National Director of the Museums of Australia, cited by Eccles (2007).


12
With the notable exception of a display of European art, and slippages between
traditional cultural practices and those made for the market in the displays of Native
American art.
16 Farago

irrational, producing symbolic, abstract, and/or fetishistic art.13


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

Staging the spiritual

By focusing on the formal qualities of its vast collection, did the Muse du
Quai Branly overcome the oppressive weight of historical taxonomies that
divided the worlds cultural productions into discrete categories of art and
artifact? Hardly. The MQB is an exceptional place, but it is the exception
that proves a rule. Allying the primitive with modern abstraction has been
a ubiquitous modern trope, one that is also replayed from the other side
of the equation, in exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal art. Recounting
his first encounter with Western Desert painting in the early days before it
became a commercial success, Philip Batty, a former teacher at Papunya

13
Anthropologist Philippe Descola, Chair of Anthropology at the Collge de
France, was responsible for the pedagoical framing and is cited frequently within
the exhibiiton, for example, in a sign that reads: PAINTING IS MENTAL.
14
Giambattista Vico, in his widely read La Scienza nuova (1725), set the terms of
discussion; see further, Connolly (1995).
Memory and Place 17

and now Senior Curator of Central Australian Collections at the Museum


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

The other half of the question is equally important: How is it still possible
in 2011 for this saleable commodity called art, to be reinserted into a
context of spiritual expression? The questions are actually just two sides
of the same coin. The link between the primitive and high modern
abstraction construed as a positive value is the issue around which the
cultural construction of the indigenous Australian artist as a High Modernist
genius takes place. To understand the theoretical underpinnings of the
system requires paying attention to the performative aspects of meaning-
making. Framing Aboriginal art as the product of individual genius is only
superficially different from suppressing the individual intentionality of the
artist in a collective display when it comes to staging spiritual presence.
For the museum is a place, too, of coursean uncanny, heterotopic
space partitioned off from the rest of the world, creating second, third,
and fourth worlds. Creating particular inflections of the inherently open-
ended relationship that exists between people and places is never a
straightforward matter. What makes the museum especially dangerous is its
presentation of a fabricated world as though it were real. The museological
presentation generates the desired effect of spiritual presence by erasing
itself as a framing effect in the very act of mediation (cf. Eisenlohr; cited in
Birgit Meyer 2011). At the Muse du Quai Branly, object and environment
merge. The apparent understatement of the white cube art gallery is another

15
Batty (2007). For one American writer, looking at Central Desert aboriginal
painting is like watching American basketball: an immemorial vocabulary
of forms, all highly ambiguous in significance, that can be pursued in an infinite
variety of modulations and innovationssometimes subtle, sometimes startling and
dramatic. Mitchell, Abstraction and Intimacy, written originally in the 1990s and
published in Mitchell (2003, citing 24142).
18 Farago

staging platform that shapes and manipulates its captive audience. In 2008,
when the National Museum in Canberra opened its retrospective exhibition
of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, indisputably the most famous Australian
woman of any ethnicity who ever painted, the show extolled her originality
as on a par with Kandinsky, Klee, and de Kooning, despite her humble
origins and subsequent life at a remote cattle station named Utopia in
the Australian outback. Kngwarreye had neither formal artistic training as
a painter nor any familiarity with European Modernism. Yet her brief and
unbelievably prolific career (she is estimated to have painted an average of
one canvas per day amounting to some 3,000 works in an eight-year span),
was described in the catalogue and on the exhibition walls as unfolding
in developmental stages comparable to the careers of equally long-living
European artists such as Rembrandt, Titian, and Michelangelo (Neale 2008,
3347). Emily, as the catalogue explained and the installation performed,
worked through the issues of Modernism entirely on her own.

Figure 18. Entryway to Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition,


Canberra, National Museum of Australia, November 2008. Photograph
Claire Farago.
Memory and Place 19

Despite the claim that Emily is a unique phenomenonand who would


doubt that she is a force of nature?isnt she enacting the normative ideals
of modern creative agency? Are we not witnessing what Foucault called the
recasting of prior representations in new forms? In yoking material things
to another domain, museology creates the bonds that it claims merely to
document: a virtual sense of meaning, direction, time, and place. In the
present context, it is important to remember that Aboriginal art succeeded
commercially in the 1990s, when High Modernism was critically waning.
From the standpoint of art as a high-end commodity form, Kngwarreyes
paintings became a new product on an old shelf as her career skyrocketed
her work offered a novel variant of an existing genre that invigorated a
tired market.
Moreover, the same move that elevated the Aboriginal artist to the
status of European modernists of an earlier generation re-inscribed the
hegemonic Eurocentric discourse in which the Aboriginal artist still
occupies the lower rung of the traditional hierarchy between civilized/
primitive, European/Other. By the time Western Desert acrylic painting
became an artistic sensation and economic goldmine in the Australian
and international art industry, the symbolic markings characteristic of the
style were viewed reductively within the framework of high modernist
abstraction, and indeed bore little resemblance to the first wave of Western
Desert painting. Kngwarreye and many other Aboriginal artists whose
styles developed on the model of Western Desert painting and whose
careers were shaped and steered by government art advisors and powerful
institutions found themselves promoted in a self-defeating position.
From an institutional standpoint, Kngwarreye was held hostage by an art
system colonized by the interests of the elite collectors who craved her
work for its unadulterated, uncanny recapitulation of formal modernism
and painted seemingly straight from the desert inhabited by Aboriginal
people still in touch with their ancestral way of life.16 As the catalogue
emphasized, Emily Kame Kngwarreyes traditional concern was with
the pencil yam (anwelarr) (see plate 19). Her name kame is given to
seeds of the pencil yam plant and she repeatedly painted the underground
network of its roots and tubers (Green 2005). Her paintings, however, were
the product of an unacknowledged collaboration with the curators and
collectors who packaged her as a modernistand not only rhetorically
but to the extent of providing her with preformatted, stretched canvases

And indeed apart from Aboriginal curator Margo Neales apparent passion for
16

Kngwarreyes art.
20 Farago

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

Imagined Places in the Twenty-First Century

The compromised agency of Aboriginal artists is thus itself emblematic


of the complexities that place entails as a signifier in the contemporary

17
Emily Kngwarraye-Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia (1998). The retrospective
at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra was based partly on research
conducted for this earlier exhibition, organized immediately after the artists death
(much to the consternation of many who hold to traditional views for respecting the
spirit of the deceased).
Memory and Place 21

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

Consequently, I have chosen to quote, cite and sample the works of many
artists from around the world . (Bell 2007, 59)18

18
Citing Richard Bell in Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial (2007,
22 Farago

Bells ironic appropriation of Roy Lichtensteins art (see plate 110)


makes its strongest point within another system of reference than that of
1960s Pop Art: the dots are no longer just references to the reproduction
process of cheap newspaper print (Ben-day dots), hence to discourses on
the originality of the artist; they are now, primarily, considered in the social
context of Australian art marketing, references to the so-called dot style
distinctive of Western Desert acrylic painting, where dots were purportedly
used at first to mask secret-sacred imagery, a bone of fierce contention
within the indigenous communities.19 The ricochets playing out in Richard
Bells laconic text are deeply and almost deliciously ironic. With this irony,
he situates himself along the moving front line of conceptual art, at least
that is the strategy. In gaming the system, Bell demonstrates that there is
no stationary ground zerorather, ground zero is a moving target, a
constantly renegotiated set of relations.
Contemporary Aboriginal art in its diverse manifestations of space,
place, situatedness, location, ground, foundation, and so on, is in many ways
paradigmatic of the position of art and of artists in contemporary Euro-
American society, and this is not due to the demands of the marketplace
alone. The opportunity seized by Emily and by the Aboriginal men of
Papunya definitely raised their sense of self-worth and created an important
new painting movement, among other things, but the retrospective
narrative of these events is still subject to the biographical framework and
the privileging of white agency associated with the most conventional
garden variety of (implicitly or explicitly racist) art history. In reframing
Emily as a (belated) Abstract Expressionist, institutional authority denied
her both the possibility of participating in the deconstructive discourse
about the Western idea of art and the possibility of acknowledging her
communal working methods even where they continued to exist. Complex
agencies were involved in Emily Kame Kngwarreyes success as a painter.
She practiced collaborative working methods during her entire career, as
did many of the Western Desert artists, but conventional accounts suppress
these aspects of their personal histories. And the young art teacher Geoff
Bardon remains the hero of the Western Desert Painting movement in

59). Bell won the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award with a work entitled
Scienta e Metaphysica (Bells Theorem), or Aboriginal Art, Its a White Thing.
19
As of this writing, the reasons for incorporating secret-sacred imagery in the
early acrylic paintings, which may not have been intended for sale, and later,
less sensitive imagery in paintings made for the market is unresolved. The main
arguments are reviewed by Bonyhandy, originally appearing as Sacred Sights in
the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2000. See further, Ryan and Batty (2011).
Memory and Place 23

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

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

20
Butler (2009, 44), responding to Sontag (2003).
21
Communication with Judith Ryan, 23 November 2008.
Memory and Place 25

References

Batty, Philip. 2007. Selling Emily: Confessions of a White Art Advisor.


Artlink Magazine 27/2 (June 2007): 6871.
Bonyhandy, Tim. 2000. Papunya Aboriginal Art and Artists Papunya
Stories. http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/resources/articles4.php.
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York:
Verso.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Introduction: The Interpretation of Dreams. In
Papunya: A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western
Desert Painting Movement, edited by G. Bardon and J. Bardon, xiv
xxi. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Miegunyah Press.
Connolly, Frances. 1995. The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern
European Art and Aesthetics, 17251907. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial. 2007. Curated by
Brenda Croft. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia.
Eccles, Jeremy. 2007. Australian Art Market Report, 23 (Autumn 2007):
3234.
Emily Kngwarraye-Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia. 1998. Edited by
Margo Neale. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery.
Farago, Claire. 1995. Vision Itself Has Its History: Race, Nation,
and Renaissance Art History. In Reframing the Renaissance: Art and
Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 14501650, edited by
Claire Farago, 6788. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. 2009. Redemptive Acts of Seeing: Riegls Australian Legacy.
In Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists, and the History of the Visual. A
volume dedicated to Martin Kemp, edited by Assimina Kaniari and
Marina Wallace, 6177. London: Zidane Press.
Garca Canclini, Nestor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Green, Jenny. 2005. The Enigma of Emily Kngwarray. In Aboriginal
Religions in Australia: An Anthology of Recent Writings, edited by
Max Charlesworth, Francoise Dussart, and Howard Morphy, 185192.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Johnson, Vivien. 2008. Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists. Alice Springs:
IAD Press.
26 Farago

Kimber, Dick. 2006. Kapi! Contact Experiences in the Western Desert


18731984. In Colliding Worlds: First Contact in the Western Desert
1932-1984. Edited by Philip Batty, 428. Melbourne: Museum Victoria.
Exhibition catalogue.
Kleinert, S. Namatjira, Albert (Elea) (19021959). Australian Dictionary
of Biography, Australian National University. http://www.adb.online.
anu.edu.au/biogs.
Langton, Marcia. 2000. Religion and Art from Colonial Conquest to
Postcolonial Resistance. In The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal
Art and Culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, 1624.
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2003. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Morphy, Howard. 1998. Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon.
. 2007. Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-cultural Categories. Oxford
& New York: Berg.
Munn, Nancy D. 1973. Walpiri Iconography: Graphic Representation
and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society. Ithaca (NY):
Cornell University Press.
Neale, Margo. 2008. Marks of Meaning: the Genius of Emily Kame
Kngwarreye. In Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
Edited by Margo Neale, 3347. Canberra: National Museum of
Australia. Exhibition catalogue.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2008. The Global Need for Collaboration.
http://collabarts.org/?p=201.
Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago. 2012. Art Is Not What You Think It Is.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ryan, Judith and Philip Batty. 2011. Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western
Desert Art. Melbourne: Museum Victoria and the National Gallery of
Victoria. Exhibition catalogue.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Multisensory Memories and the Spaces
of Suburban Childhood in the Greater
Helsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s

Kirsi Saarikangas

The summer suburb was printed on my memory in certain scenes,


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

A man who moved to the Kontula suburb in eastern Helsinki at the age
of six in the mid-1960s gives a multisensory and vivid picture of his
childhood suburban milieu. He wrote down his reminiscences thirty years
later, in 19951996, for an essay competition arranged by the major Finnish
newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

1
Kesinen lhi piirtyi mieleen joissain nkymiss, tunnelmissa ja hajuissa.
Kuumuutta ja ply. Likaisia ja hikisi poikia pelaamassa jalkapalloa. Sateen
jlkeen kostean asfaltin kaupunkilainen tuoksu, kun tultiin maalta kotiin. Kellareita,
porttikytvi, tasakattoja, rappukytvi, parkkitasanteita, betonia. Mutta myskin
puistikoita, nurmikoita ja tihe mets, jota ei ollut viel muutettu puistoksi ja, jota
kutsuimme seitsenvuotiaina naskaleina sademetsksi. . . . Vlill puikahdettiin
ulos metsst suoraan rakennustelineiden ja lautakasojen keskelle, betonimyllyjen
nostattamaan plyyn. Lapsuudenkuvien keskell on oma paikkansa keskenerisill
rakennuksilla ja kiehtovalla mrll rakennustarpeita. . . . Puutavaran ja sementin
tuoksu kertoivat jnnst runsaudesta, josta aina lysi jotain uutta. Unless otherwise
mentioned all translations are my own. On the writing competition see footnote 3.
28 Saarikangas

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

Figure 21. Kontulankaari 1 Kaarikuja 2, Kontula, Helsinki. Photograph


Jalmari Aarnio 1968. Helsinki City Museum.

The long passage quoted at the beginning is remarkable because it


incorporates several features frequently mentioned in written accounts
Multisensory Memories 29

of suburban living, features that were characteristic of the then new


suburban landscape. Besides the visual elements the passage brings out
the interconnected sensory, physical and visual perceptions of built space.
The narrator attaches his remembrances of the suburban childhood milieu
to sensuous, atmospheric glimpses. The suburban neighbourhood emerges
as a multilayered, lived space through the uses of the environment and
through movements, acts, gestures, postures and sensations. Moreover, the
passage highlights the importance of suburban social life and playgrounds,
the juxtaposition of new buildings with undeveloped forest land and the
incomplete and continuously changing nature of the suburban setting.
Architecture, or built space, is a form of visual and material culture
that is experienced in both a visible and a sensory way. Inhabitants use and
sense their environment in a random and absent-minded way rather than
observing it attentively. In addition to looking thoughtfully, perceiving and
experiencing the environment is also both unconscious and corporeal. It
happens in the interaction of all the senses. In recent years there has been
an increased interest in tactile visuality and the sensory and emotive aspects
of built space. However, awareness of the sensory features of architecture
is not a recent phenomenon. In his influential essay The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) Walter Benjamin drew attention to
the tactile dimensions of architecture. In his view, architecture represents
the prototype of a work of art that is received in a state of distraction
and by the collective (Benjamin 2008, 34). Buildings are utilised in two
ways: through use and by being viewed, or in other words, by tactile and by
optical means of observation. What determines each perception is habit and
custom rather than contemplation (Benjamin 2008, 3335).
Below, I discuss the visible and sensory features of built space and
their relation to memory through written recollections of suburban life in
the greater Helsinki region. I approach the suburbs as stratified, relational
spaces and dynamic processes that change over time.2 My particular interest
is in the remembrances of childhood spaces and sensescape. To what kinds
of spaces and places do suburbanites attach their childhood memories? An
exceptionally large body of written personal recollections of suburban life

2
I am basing my discussion on my broader study of the lived suburban spaces in
the Helsinki region. In order to obtain a multi-faceted picture of the suburbs, I have
combined an examination of the visual and physical appearances of the suburbs
with an analysis of media representations of them and with memoirs of suburban
living.
30 Saarikangas

in the Helsinki region from the 1950s to the 1970s was collected between
1995 and 2000, thanks to essay competitions organised by such institutions
as the Helsingin Sanomat (199596) and the Finnish Literature Society
(19992000), which attracted almost 300 entrants.3 In this material a
new type of urban space lives and breathes in a compelling manner. The
suburbanites depicted both the common features of suburban habitation
that they shared with other writers and the distinct qualities of their own
suburbs. They told stories that are both collective and deeply personal with
sensuous individual and generational memories and corporeal experiences.
The written accounts focus on daily experiences and intimate aspects of
the lived suburban space along with culturally coded meanings. In addition
to the particular, located meanings of suburban living in the greater
Helsinki region in the latter half of the twentieth century, the accounts
offer a means of approaching the sensory and experiential aspects of built
space and the ways in which the environment emerges as meaningful,
lived space in general.4 However, there is a split between the lived and
the narrated experiences: the lived spatial experiences are always already
past and mediated, and only traces of them can be retrieved. The narratives
support the notion of the sensory nature of built space by drawing
attention to mobility, the inhabitants activities and the tactile, aural and
olfactory dimensions of spatial experience. The contributors depicted their
environment largely through its use, their doings and various activities,
thereby bringing out the relationship between the sensory and the visual
observations of built space, as well as the meanings that emerge in the
mobility and use of the environment. Voices, scents, movements, surface
textures, motion and the feel of the air on the skin shape the meanings of the

3
The competition organised by the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature
Society (SKS) concentrated on particular areas in the greater Helsinki region
(Kontula and Siilitie), drawing a total of 82 entrants, while the Helsingin Sanomat
competition covered the entire greater region of Helsinki. The result was over
200 stories from more than 40 different suburbs. The collections have been partly
published in Astikainen et al., 1997, Kokkonen 2002 and Kesnen 2002. Quotations
from the Life in the Suburbs collection is referred to as LS plus a collection number,
while quotations from the Kontula and Siilitie collections are cited as SKS, Kontula
or SKS, Siilitie respectively with a page number.
4
However, it is important to note that built spaces are also complex networks of
power and closely related to social and cultural ideals, norms and practices. The
order of space is affected by historical, political and societal issues and in turn
affects them.
Multisensory Memories 31

landscape along with its visual featuresas if the landscape were inscribed
on the bodies of the narrators as physical remembrances. Having grown up
in the Haukilahti suburb in Espoo in the mid-1960s, I share my memories
with generations who moved into the new suburbs as children during the
1950s to the 1970s. The suburban environment significantly shaped my
relations to spaces, places and landscapes. While my experiences and
situated knowledge (Haraway 1991) may help me to perceive some
features of suburban habitation, they veil others. Therefore, along with
writing about inhabitants recollections, I am writing and remembering
along with them (Rogoff 2003, 13334).

Suburbs: Lived Spaces and Inhabited Landscapes

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

movements and gestures (de Certeau 1980, 173; 1984, 117). The idea
of lived space puts the emphasis on mobility, parallel lived spaces and
moving, porous boundaries. The lived space is formed in the reciprocity of
the inhabitants and their environment, in the located encounters between
inhabitants, architecture, landscape and things, in the constant cycle of
production and reproduction of space and the meanings in its everyday
use (de Certeau 1980, 17374; Lefebvre 1974, 4255; Soja 1996, 65).
According to de Certeau, users actualise the meanings by using a space
rather than by distant visual perception. He emphasises practices of
pedestrians and the meanings that emerge in their everyday practices.
Sensations and random, casual observations are crucial for those practices
(de Certeau 1980, 13940).
Place in turn is attached to the concrete materiality and personal
meanings of a particular location. In contrast to the more neutral area,
place is an experiential and subjective notion (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977).
The emphasis on the experiential and existential meanings of place,
however, has often implied the stability of place. The geographer Doreen
Massey has therefore suggested the reconceptualisation of place in a vein
similar to space. While space is layered and mobile, ranging from the
intimacy of the household to the wide space of transglobal connections,
the meaning of place is porous as well. According to Massey, a place
is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a
particular location (Massey 1994, 168). Hence, while place is bound to
a unique location, it too is open and expands outside its physical borders.
In suburbanites written memories, for example, the yard was part of the
dwelling space through windows and balconies; furthermore, the idea of
homeplace extended outward, to the inhabited suburban landscape.
Inhabited landscape is a third spatial concept important here. The term
landscape refers both to the visible features of a vast area of land and to
its representations and hence is strongly connected to the sense of sight.
However, landscape is also an inhabited and meaningfully experienced
locality. It is both a perceived and a lived physical environment. a particular
mode of apprehending the environment (Haila 2006, 2327; Johansson
2006, 48). It is therefore possible to suggest that meaningful, lived spaces
and inhabited landscapes emerge through usewithin a wider web of
cultural and societal ideals and valuesas much as in deliberately looking
at the physical environment as an object to be appreciated by the viewers
(Mitchell 1994, 14).
Multisensory Memories 33

Suburban Childhood Revisited

The suburban environment with its buildings and topography crucially


shaped the narrators relations to and perceptions of landscape. This
environment was an elemental part of their lived, multisensory experiences
of space marked by affective memories. In their writings, the majority
of narrators returned to the important and formative years of their lives:
more than half of them recollected their childhood and youth, while the
restwith a very few exceptionsrecalled their lives as young mothers or
fathers. Three-quarters of the narrators were women.
The suburbanites wrote their life stories in answer to competitions that
called for memories of personal experiences and inhabitants viewpoints on
the suburbs or how it was to live on the remotest edges of a city, a phrase
that referred to a series of articles on suburban habitation in the Helsingin
Sanomat in 1975.5 The writing guidelinesalthough relatively loose
and the writing process itself inevitably directed the approaches of the
contributors and guided their memories. Whereas memory is discontinuous,
the recollections of the suburbanites often formed coherent retrospective
narratives. Narration is thick, with a whole life history often told in a few
pages. The style and length of the depictions vary: most of them are two to
four pages, a few are as many as twenty pages, and some of them were even
more ambitious (Pys 2003, 22832; Saarikangas 2009, 13740).
The recollections provide a counter-narrative of multilayered suburban
space to the uniform critique of dormitory suburbs, which was still
prevalent in the media at the time the suburbanites wrote their life stories.
As Irene Roivainen pointed out in a study (1999) in which she analysed
the discourse on the suburbs from 1955 to 1993 based on articles in the
Helsingin Sanomat, the idea of the suburb as a locus of social opportunity
shifted in the mid-1960s to the rhetoric of bare housing. Since then,
suburbs have been discussed as failures of modern social planning and
identified as sites of social alienation (Roivainen 1999, 60). In striking
contrast to the critical discourse on suburbs, the contributors described
suburbs as complex living environments and localities that could also
incorporate mutually contradictory meanings. They underlined the social
networks, personal experiences and active aspects of living in suburbs.
5
The series consisted of three articles: Mit on el pkaupunkiseudun
rimmisiss nurkissa? (What is it like to live on the remotest edges of a city?, 26
October 1975), Puolen miljoonan suomalaisen koko elm (Life for half a million
Finns, 1 November 1975) and Olen kuullut on kaupunki tuolla (I have heard of a
city over there, 9 November 1975).
34 Saarikangas

The picture of life in the suburbs provided by their residents is radically


different from the perspective of either outside observers or architectural
analyses. Indeed, in their general visual appearance different suburbs
reminded of each otheras much as different cities from the same epoch
reminded of each otherand their planning and construction was defined
by the uniform principles of modern town planning and the ideal of living
close to nature. When suburbs have been studied primarily as architecture
and on the level of planning principles, their homogeneity has been stressed
(Kervanto Nevanlinna 2005, 23), but the inhabitants accounts bring out
distinct, heterogeneous features and spatial discontinuities.
The scenery of suburban childhooda time when sensory experiences
are markedly acuteis recalled with particular emotions and sensuousness.
Childhood spatial experiences affect later perceptions of space, as the
humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has emphasised in his influential
discussion on the formation of a sense of place. Knowing a place is a long
process: it happens over the span of years and occurs subconsciously,
corporeally and modestly in repetitive activities and multisensory
experiences (Tuan 1977, 183). According to Tuan, the spatial sensations
of the childhood environment accentuate later relations to space, place
and landscape, forming a kind of basic landscape and primordial sense of
home. These early perceptions of home resonate in all later homes: home
often means a childhood home (Tuan 2004).
Habitation takes place in mundane, repetitive routines. The feminist
philosopher Iris Marion Young has underlined the activities of inhabitants
in the emergence of spatial meanings. Dwellings are made into homes
through active and affective homework embedded in the concrete
materiality of rooms, objects, habits, gestures and personal histories,
through performing basic activities of life (Young 1991, 162). Applying
Youngs ideas more broadly to the inhabited environment, it is possible to
suggest that the meanings of environment are formed in daily activities,
practices and movements. With its spatial layout, objects and things, the
environmentnatural or builtsupports or interferes with routines by
providing pathways for inhabitants practices, movements and bodily habits
(Young 1991, 14951). Meanings are attached to surroundings, itineraries
and things as well as to the memories, emotions and social relations
assigned to them.
In the narratives, the contributors revisited the important sites of their
personal histories and suburban childhoods. Moreover, by locating their
remembrances in suburban places, the writers created places of memory that
Multisensory Memories 35

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

Landscape and People in Motion

New homes with their modern conveniences were a precondition for the
processes in which the suburbs emerged as home regions. The narrators
repeatedly referred to feelings of joy and happiness that were aroused,
even physically, by the heavenly new apartments with their spaciousness
and all modern conveniences. Young mothers in particular praised the
new amenities, and those contributors who moved to the suburbs during
their childhood enthusiastically recalled the bathtubs in their new homes
to the degree that this population has been called the bathtub generation
(Kesnen 2002, 1213).
It is therefore all the more interesting to observe that most of their
attention was paid to outdoor life. The inhabited environment is experienced
and depicted in a multisensory manner, and as an experience both visual
and physical, it defined in a profound sense the feeling of home and
belonging to a place. In the narratives, the sense of home stretches beyond
the physical borders of dwelling, to the yards, forests, social relations and
landscape (Massey 1994, 171). The transforming environment and the co-
existence of new buildings, the remains of earlier settlement and the unbuilt
nature form the mental landscape of suburban childhood.
36 Saarikangas

Figure 22. Suburb under construction in Helsinki. Photograph K. G. Roos,


late 1950s. Finnish Museum of Photography.

Although in the 1950s and 1960s the aim of town planning and housing
policy was to design and construct an entire suburb all at once, in reality,
the setting remained incomplete for a long time and included remnants of
earlier habitation. Numerous contributors stressed the feeling of moving
onto a building site. A woman who moved to Kontula in the year 1966 at
the age of seven recalled:
When we moved in the spring, the neighbourhood was muddy and
everything was unfinished. It hardly bothered us, at least us children. In
the early years we went for long walks with my father all over Kontula,
exploring new houses and streets. In the plot next door there had previously
been a prefabrication factory; now it was an appealing place for children for
play. . . . The best play areas, the remains of old fortifications, were on the
other side of the road.6 (LS 75, my emphasis)

6
Muuttaessamme kevll ymprist oli viel kurainen ja kaikki keskenerist. Se ei juuri
haitannut, ainakaan meit lapsia. Isn kanssa teimme alkuvuosina kvelylenkkej ympri
Kontulaa tutkien uusia taloja ja katuja. Naapuritontilla oli aiemmin ollut elementtitehdas,
nyt siin oli kaiken romun keskell lapsille houkutteleva leikkipaikka. . . . Tien toisella
puolella olivat parhaat leikkipaikat, kalliot vanhoine juoksuhautoineen. Some of the
Multisensory Memories 37

The writer defined the important places in her suburban childhood in


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

Asphalt was an important seasonal smell and also an environmental


element of the new suburban surroundings. The contributors often recalled
suburban scenery through scents and sounds. There was a lot of asphalt in
the new suburb. It was put down in the spring, and again a new urban smell
spread into the home. The asphalt machines were great big monsters full
of sun-tanned men, wrote a woman who moved to Pihlajamki in 1965 at
the age of eight (LS 40)8. Although a human-made artefact, asphalt and its
smell became almost a natural element of the suburban sensescape.
The connections between memory and suburban sensescape are apparent
in the narratives.The reader can almost smell the new, warm asphalt and
freshly cut grass, hear the sounds of construction and yard life and sense the
movement in the incomplete environment in her or his body and muscles.
The scents and flavours especially carried the writers through the layers of

suburbs included the remains of fortifications built by the Russian Army around Helsinki
during the First World War, when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire.
7
Muistan aina milt rakenteilla oleva kerrostalo tuoksui eri vaiheissaan. Ensin oli
kallioon rjytetty vetinen kuoppa johon tehtiin laudoituksia ja sementtivalut, sitten paikalle
tuotiin elementit joista sateessa lhti aivan oma kellarimainen hajunsa, ja viimeisess
vaiheessa olivat erilaiset maalinkryt. Pihalla tuoksuivat lisksi uusi multa ja asfaltti.
8
Lhiss oli paljon asfalttia. Kevll sit tehtiin ja taas yksi uusi kaupunkihaju
levisi kotiin. Asfalttikoneet olivat suuria petoja, tynn ruskeaksipaahtuneita miehi.
38 Saarikangas

time into previously lived-in spaces. The corporeal memories of earlier spatial
experiences were actualised in the process of writing down the memories.
In a similar fashion, film director Kaisa Rastimo explained her return to her
childhood neighbourhood in Tapiola in an interview: The perfume of roses
persuaded me to return. Scents and smells are inscribed on the subconscious,
and in my childhood, the roses smelled so divine (Rastimo 2003).9
A walking pace was crucial in the appropriation of the suburban
landscape. In the 1950s and early 1960s Finnish suburbs were
characteristically designed with pedestrians in mind. Schools, shopping
centres and areas designated for sports were all located within walking
distance of homes (Meurman 1947). In the narratives the environment
opens up as an operational locus of activities. The suburban landscape,
its topography and its architecture take shape through use and mobility, in
pathways and in routes (see also Jokinen, Asikainen and Mkinen 2010).
Walking and doing, pedestrian utterings and their ways of doing
things, are important in being aware of the topography of place and the
formation of lived spatial meanings, as de Certeau emphasised (1980,
14859; 1984, 9799). Contributors mapped out their childhood suburban
environment through various comings and goings, itineraries and activities.
The environment was observed and learned by walking and wandering
around rather than from a single vantage point, in the same manner as the
anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out (Ingold 2011, 4345). In Ingoldis
view, walking affects what and how the environment is perceived and
seen; movement, postures and gestures are crucial means of experiencing,
observing and piecing together the environment. Kaja Silverman writes
about postural function; she refers to the psychologist Henri Wallon in
her discussion of the kinaesthetic perception and experience of the self
of the moving body and the sensational or proprioceptive ego. The
subject senses itself physically in space through postures, gestures and
movement (Silverman 1996, 16).

The Suburban Yard: A Childs Paradise

The main meeting places in the new suburbs were situated outside homes
and often outdoors. Yards and playgrounds were important locations for
daily encounters. Social relationships, whether close or somewhat distant,

9
Ruusun tuoksu minut tnne houkutteli. Hajut painuvat alitajuntaan, ja minun
lapsuudessani tuoksuivat ruusut.
Multisensory Memories 39

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

Figure 23. Suburban yard life in Kisakyl, Helsinki. Photograph Heikki


Havas, late 1950s. Museum of Finnish Architecture.

10
Lapsena min en koskaan halunnut lhte pois meidn pihalta. Siell oli kaikkea
mit voi kaivata: kallioita, puita, pensaita, krookuksia, hiekkalaatikoita, keinuja,
leikkimkkej, liukumki ja vihret. Vihret olivat kiipeilytelineet. . . . Soukka,
meidn talo ja piha ovat minulle yh lapsuuden koti, kaikkine haikeine muistoineen,
ja vielkin min pidn enemmn sepelist kuin nurmikosta.
40 Saarikangas

Suburban outdoor life with its abundance of children emerges as a childs


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

11
Koskaan ei tarvinnut olla yksin. Aina kun meni pihalle, nki joku kaveri
ikkunasta ja tuli ulos.
12
Reviirit olivat alusta saakka tiukat. Viis tarkoista tonttirajoista: meidn taloomme
kuuluivat hienot kalliot ja louhikot, eik sinne ollut naapuritalon lapsilla juurikaan
asiaa.
Multisensory Memories 41

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

This was written by a woman who moved from a wooden courtyard


cottage on the outskirts of Helsinki to Pihlajamki at the age of eight.13
She emphasised the strangeness of (sub)urban living and habitation in an
apartment where neighbours came close, unlike rural-type habitation in a
separate house.
While the suburbs might be characterised as a kind of paradise for
children, for many youngsters the suburbs were boring. The most negative
recollections of living in the suburbs were written by contributors who

13
Minua pelottivat net, joita kuului seinien takaa. Kolahduksia, laahausta,
mutinaa. Ylpuolella kveli joku. Rapussa kvi ovi. Pahinta olivat porausnet,
jotka kulkivat seinien sisll kaikkialle. . . . Pihalta tunkivat kaupungin hajut ja
net sisn. Autoja kynnistettiin aamuisin ikkunan alla.
42 Saarikangas

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

Forest and Wasteland

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

Cellars and stairways, shopping centres and hot-dog stands and their
surroundings, above all the forests and wastelands, provided teenagers with

14
Elm lhiss muuttui kurjaksi murrosiss . . . Ja lhitaustastani mieluiten
muistan juuri aikaa 0-12-vuotiaana. Muistan sen olleen ksittmttmn runsasta
aikaa, mit tulee touhuun, leikkeihin, kavereihin, kekseliisyyteen, iloon,
jnnitykseen, toivoon
15
Lapsuus ji taakse tullessamme 70-luvulle. Pihlajamki ei pystynyt tarjoamaan
nuorilleen paljoakaan. . . . Lmpimn vuodenaikaan ei tilojen puute paljoakaan
haitannut. Aurinko kutsui nuoret ulos rappukytvist ja kellareista nauttimaan
kesst ostarin kallioilla, puistossa, suojaisissa metsikiss tai hyppyrimell, jossa
sai olla aivan rauhassa ilman vanhempien tai viranomaisten valvovia silmi.
Multisensory Memories 43

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

16
Asuntomme oli pitkss, valkoisessa suorakulman muotoisessa talossa, jonka
etupiha oli asfalttia ja kalliota, mutta takapihalta alkoi mets. Se mets, jossa
nykyisin on Pihlajisto, onkin lapsuusmuistojeni keskeisimpi paikkoja. Siell oli
loputtomasti mielenkiintoisia ja jnnittvi leikkipaikkoja. . . . Mets merkitsi
meille kaupunkilaisnuorille yhteytt luontoon, vastakohtana talon toisella puolella
olevalle asfaltti- ja kivitaloermaalle.
44 Saarikangas

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

Figure 24. Munkkivuori, Helsinki. Photograph C. Grnberg 1960. Helsinki


City Museum.

Living close to nature was the leitmotiv of modern Finnish housing


planning after the Second World War. The natural surroundings and outdoor
recreation areas were thought to provide inhabitants of different ages with
opportunities for healthy activities. Nature was valued primarily for its role
in healing and leisure time, as a healthy and static surrounding, and less as
the place of inhabitants activities. While nature in the immediate vicinity
of buildings was more or less shaped, the nature on the fringes of habitation
was mostly left as it was. Planning was governed by an aestheticizing
attitude towards nature, which was understood as a visual backdrop to
Multisensory Memories 45

human action. Paradoxically, however, nature remained beyond the domain


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

Multisensory memories

The memories of suburbanites are closely tied to corporeal reminiscences


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

Affective recollections of past spaces resonate in the current landscape: I


remember that in the place of the current Itkeskus shopping centre, there
was a large field and a pasture, where cattle grazed during the summer. The
smell of manure is a vivid memory of those times, recalled a woman who
lived in Puotinharju as a child in the mid-1960s (LS 48).17
The absent becomes temporarily present and almost tangible when the
writer re-lives her previous spatial experiences. Suburban space is depicted
as a palimpsest of invisible things that are no longer there. Even the places
that have changed almost beyond recognition carry memories of previous
spaces, things and buildings, while simultaneously reminding of the
disappearance of the past. The suburban scenery includesand included
already at the time the suburbs were builtvisible, invisible and gradually
disappearing historical sediment and fragments. The meanings of landscape
emerge and in due course are transformed in the use of the environment,
but also in writing about it. A woman who moved to Mellunmki in 1968 at
the age of six recalled the landscape of her suburban childhood:
We moved from Mellunmki to Puistola in 1973, and for many years I felt
a flood of warm memories in my heart whenever I visited Mellunmki.
But now I dont feel anything, as my childhood Mellunmki doesnt exist
anymore. All the forest area has been built up, rocks have been moved and
the old school demolished. (LS 119)18

For the writer, the current landscape became meaningful though previous
spatial sensations and perceptions. The depiction combines past and
present and oscillates between them. Even the landscape of the past is not
finished and static, but open and moving. Henri Bergson has pointed out
the co-existence of past and present. In the act of remembering, past and
present are born simultaneously, at the moment when the past accumulated
in the memory becomes a part of the present in the form of recollections.
The past might be grasped only in the form of remembrances, or habit-
memory, but those recollections and the past are conditions of perception

17
Muistan, ett nykyisen Itkeskuksen kohdalla aukenivat pellot ja laidun, jolle
suuri karja kevn tultua pstettiin. Lannan haju tulee mys noista ajoista elvsti
mieleen.
18
Muutimme Mellunmest Puistolaan 1973 ja monta vuotta sen jlkeen kaipasin
Mellunmkeen ja tunsin likhdyksen sydmessni kydessni siell. En en
ole tuntenut aikoihin mitn, koska lapsuuteni Mellunmke ei ole en. Kaikki
metst on rakennettu tyteen, kivet viety pois ja vanha koulu purettu. Lapsuuteni
Mellunmke ei ole en. Kaikki metst on rakennettu tyteen, kivet viety pois ja
vanha koulu purettu.
Multisensory Memories 47

and each moment of the present (Bergson 2004, 8896, 14748; Grosz
2005, 1014). Thus, rather than a point of fixed meanings, suburbs,
like built spaces in general, are spatial intersections and interactive
relationships among the surroundings, the buildings, planners, inhabitants,
previous spatial experiences and the past and present cultural contexts, to
paraphrase the notion of intertextuality introduced by the literary critic and
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin) in the
late 1960s (Kristeva 1969, 83).
The close relationship between space, sensations and memory has often
been pointed out. Memory is orientated towards space and place, or at
least supported by them (Casey 1987, 18687). Scents, sounds, flavours
and colours organise the memory and can momentarily evoke or revoke
sensations of previous experiences of spaces and places. These sensations
have the capacity to transport us through space and time, as in Marcel
Prousts involuntary memory. While Proust emphasised a present that was
influenced by the past, in the Finnish accounts spatial memories reactivated
the past suburban sensescape (A. Assmann 2011, 8). The contributors
went back in time to their personal places of memory and moved from one
affective location and scenery to another. Their narratives pointed out the
topographical nature of memory by repeating expressions such as this is
where and here was The dimensions of space and time, personal history
and topography thereby coalesced into a landscape of generational and
local memory (A. Assmann 2011, 48). Spaces are powerful sources of
memories (Hayden 1995, 18). However, they are not immobile and passive
containers, but rather they interact with the present to open and unfold
recollections of the past.
Memory is selective: for the functioning of memory, forgetting is
just as vital as remembering (J. Assmann 2006, 3). Hence, memory
is both what we have and what we forget. Suburbanites recorded their
memories of suburban living in the context of a wider network of cultural
meanings, often looking thirty or forty years back to the time when the
suburbs were newly built. The writers commented on the meta-narratives
of bare habitation and healthy living near nature, framing the suburbs
and constructing and reconstructing their own historical pasts. Their
remembrances were mediated by and interpreted through the present.
Insiders and outsiders perspectives overlap. Besides the past, the writers
depicted the contemporary situation as muchor even more (A. Assmann
2011, 19).
An optimistic and bright-eyed spirit dominates the accounts.
Contributors revisited retrospectively their personal places of memory
48 Saarikangas

when they looked towards a future by evoking a sense of the future in the
past. In most cases their recollections focused on summer or winter, with
playing and joining in games in the yard and the sounds of a skating rink.
Why is everything viewed through romantic lenses? asked a woman who,
as child in the 1960s, lived in Kannelmki (LS 30). She recalled especially
the social life of the suburban yards and the presence of her mother. While
the accounts represent a kind of nostalgic homecoming to the childhood
environment and a rehabilitation of the suburbs, they also depicted the
suburbs as ordinary living environments. Moreover, these contributors had
inhabited the suburbs and they depicted them as home placesa feature
rarely connected with the suburbs in public discussions.
The classical art of memory combined places and images, and made
use of the relations between spatial and visual memory. The classical orator
remembered his speech by locating it in the concrete places of memory, loci
memoriae. In his speech, he would re-enter a building and move from room
to room, dwelling upon objects and details while following a particular
route in a particular order (Yates 1966, 24; Nora 1989, 9; A. Assmann
2011, 17). The Finnish accounts often follow the same pattern of moving in
the suburban space, beginning with the relocation and the landscape under
construction and then unfolding memories of particular sites and locations.
In the following passage, a woman literally walks into her childhood
scenery in the 1960s:
I moved back to Pihlajamki. It was a self-evident solution after I was
shipwrecked. I walked into the landscape of my childhood. Here is the
spruce under which I dug a pit in the snow and imagined that I was lost at
the North Pole. In that brook I floated my dolls. From that rock we slid down
the icy slope into deep snow. But I saw that the landscape had changed. In
that forest we went skiing during the Winter Olympics, ate rye bread and
kale from a jacket pocketnow there is the Pihlajisto suburb.19 (LS 41)

She writes tangibly and affectively, interweaving visual and sensuous


meanings and memoriesas if the landscape were stratified in her body,
movements and muscles as physical remembrances forming a kind of

19
Min muutin takaisin Pihlajamkeen viisi vuotta sitten. Se oli itsestn selv
ratkaisu haaksirikkouduttuani. Kvelin lapsuuteni maisemaan. Tuossa on se
kuusi, jonka alle tein lumikuopan ja kuvittelin eksyneeni Pohjoisnavalle. Tuossa
purossa uitin nukkeja. Tuolta kalliolta liuuttiin jt pitkin pystysuoraan syvn
hankeen. . . . Mutta nin maiseman muuttuneen. Tuossa metsss hiihdeltiin
talviolympialaisten aikaa, sytiin ruisleip ja kaalia anorakin etutaskustanyt
siin on Pihlajisto.
Multisensory Memories 49

cartography of body (Kristeva 1980, 87) or a muscular unconscious


(Bachelard 1964). Through the completely transformed landscape, she felt
and saw the previous layers of her inhabited childhood landscape, now
partly invisible, gone. The writer went back in space and time and walked
into old, familiar landscapes and the way things used to be, but now both
the landscape and the narrator had been changed. In her narrative, looking
at the landscape and acting and moving in it overlapped and worked
together. Landscape was depicted both through itineraries walked and
sceneries viewed. Throughout there are passages back and forth between
the two modes of observation (de Certeau 1980, 17578).
While the passage underlines the importance of walking and doing in
the formation of spatial meanings, it also, as Doreen Massey writes, shows
that you can never simply go back, to home or to anywhere else. People
and places move on and change (Massey 2005, 124).
Tuan underlined the stability of place: places store memories and traces
of different sediments of time (Tuan 1977, 6). However, places are also fluid
and moving. They are open and dynamic processes that are constructed of
interrelations elsewhere, outside their physical boundaries Even home is
an ambiguous notion that can be approached both as a place-bound anchor
and a spatially open structure that changes over time (Massey 1994, 167
71). In the inhabitants accounts, suburban places and the whole inhabited
suburban landscape is in motion. Places are not just inertly there; instead,
the contributors depicted them through their later spatial observations and
experiences.

Sensuous and Visible Space in the Suburbs

Suburban space is above all a sensuously experienced and practised,


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

moved to Kontula in 1967, recalling the view from east to west (LS 77).20
Along with the spacious views opening out before them, inhabitants
perceived landscape from nearby and from within, and paid attention to its
details. The landscape was therefore not only looked at from a particular
angle, but also experienced in close corporeal and mindful contact. As in
the excerpt above, seeing is also sensory and tactile: the writer felt the
broad view in the pit of her stomach.
The random observation and multisensory experiencing of the
environment underlines a feeling of being inside the landscape and
receiving it by means of the tactile or haptic modes of perception, identified
by Alois Riegl. Riegl distinguished the haptic or near mode of vision,
analogous to touching, from the distant or optic view, analogous to the
synoptic survey of objects in space without privileging one over the other
(Riegl 1901; Iversen 1993, 9). The Finnish accounts point to a double
movement or an entanglement of sensing and looking, closeness and
distance in the formation of suburban space and its meanings. Whereas the
studies of haptic perception have mostly focused on manual touch (Ingold
2011, 45), in the Finnish memories observing and familiarising oneself with
the environment as a pedestrian is an important mode of haptic perception.
The recollections pointed out the importance of touching the ground, the
rhythm of walking and the connections between vision and the feet in
forming spatial meanings, knowing the surroundings and piecing together
the connections between various places. Walking is a way to experience
and know ones environment.
Besides the entanglement of the senses in experiencing an environment,
the accounts emphasised the role of inhabitants and the interplay of various
actors in the formation of meaningful suburban space. The inhabitants,
the interplay of treated or untreated environment, individual and shared
experiences and cultural ideals made the suburbs stratified and complex
lived spaces. Space, time and inhabitants, stable and moving elements of
the environmentwhether human or non-human, tangible or intangible
acted together and shaped the built environment (Latour 2007, 3233).
Built and lived spaces are therefore not fixed or contained, but open to
various uses and different kinds of habitation. Spaces, their meanings and
the recollections of them constantly emerge and change over time, which

20
Kyllhn se vatsasta vhn kouraisikin, kun parvekkeella kvi ensimmisi
kertoja, mutta nkihn sielt tosi kauas, aina Tapiolan tornitaloille, joissa olivat
nuo V-muotoiset siivekkeet. Indeed, in the 1960s architects laid out some of the
suburbs as gigantic graphic figures that spread out over the landscape. The layout as
a whole could only have been perceived from a watchtower or an airplane.
Multisensory Memories 51

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

Bibliography

Sources

Folklore Archives, Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki.


Kontula collection.
Siilitie collection.
Helsinki City Archives, Helsinki.
Elm lhiiss (Life in the Suburbs), Helsingin Sanomat
collection.

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II

Urban Spaces
Urban Imagery between Enchantment
and Disenchantment

Bart Keunen

In his introduction to The Colossus of New York, published in 2003, the


American poet Colson Whitehead wrote:
[Y]ou are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munseys, or
That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet caf plugged
itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used
to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real
and solid than what is here now. (Whitehead 2003, 34)

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

for diminishing complexity and as such have become indispensable to


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

The Janus Face of Modern Urban Space:


Enchantment and Disenchantment

One useful way of confining the study of the chaotic modern experience
and of the compensatory imaginary constructions is to focus on the most
variable of all modern spacesthe city. Throughout history metropoles
have been a symbol of specific collective experiences. Earlier, as well
as now, urban representations enabled cities to function as symbols and
allowed for a particular identity to be attributed to an urban community. The
religious identity of a nation, for example, was symbolised by the heavenly
city, Jerusalem. Similarly, the splendour and glory of the first civilisations
were symbolised by the pyramids or the city of Babylon, and the formidable
colonising power on a political or religious level was symbolised by the
city of Rome. However, it was a different symbolism than that which is
active in our time. Indeed, we cannot claim that it was the sociological
structure of these ancient cities that gave rise to a specifically urban cultural
identity. In a sense, the urban was of secondary importance. Rather what
was at stake was the incidental fact that political and religious power were
concentrated in the city and that the city contained buildings that could
easily become symbols of that power. When, in modern times, the city
functions as a symbol for a broader social condition, it does so with a shift

1
I use the distinction space-place in the sense attributed to it by geographer Yi-Fu
Tuan: In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. Space
is more abstract than place. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place
as we get to know it better and endow it with value.... The ideas space and place
require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are
aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if
we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause
in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place (Tuan
1977, 6).
Urban Imagery 59

in emphasis; apart from associating the cultural identity of a community


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

Weber and King Vidor on Rationalisation

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

In The Crowd, director King Vidor paints a picture of Manhattan that


mirrors the analysis offered by Max Weber. This classic film of modern
metropolitan life, released in 1928, deals with the individuals ambition to
stand up to the crowd and to rise to such heights that he is finally noticed
and becomes visible. Early in the film, there is a famous sequence in which
Vidor introduces New York to the spectator: he zooms in on the mighty port
of New York, on the intense business traffic guaranteed by a railroad and
automobile network, on the headquarters of big corporations listed on the
Wall Street stock exchange, on the hectic hustle and bustle in the streets,
where city-dwellers appear to be perpetually on their way to the office. The
sequence ends with an evocation of an office building in which the camera
gradually loses itself. As the image dissolves, the camera slides through the
window of a skyscraper to reveal a gigantic office space, where hundreds of
clerks are hard at work at identical desks. When the camera zooms in on the
films protagonist, a frustrated social climber or careerist who gets lost in an
anonymous crowd, a name-board becomes visible: John Sims 137. Behind
the powerful economic machinery of a hypermodern metropolis, Vidor
seems to suggest, hides the many-headed monster of bureaucracy. The
images of transport systems and business activities in Manhattan, and both
the image of a monstrous bureaucratic institution and that of a lonely figure
working with countless others in enormous office spaces, are fine examples
of what Weber called die Entzauberung der Welt (the disenchantment of
the world). By staging the contrast between the economic, institutional
and architectural power of New York with the alienating isolation of the
protagonist, King Vidor illustrates the two aspects of our disenchanted
world.2
In the 1930s, Max Weber concluded that modernity had destroyed
traditions, that it had questioned the values and the emotional warmth of
these traditions and put a world of cool calculation and technocratically-
minded citizens in its place. In the name of rationality, here and now, truths

2
Both aspects, the wealth-producing capitalist machinery and the bureaucratic
system, are central to Zygmunt Baumans characterisation of the modern
individuals new urban lifestyle: Modernity came up with two great institutions
meant to assure the prevalence of morality through following rules. One was
bureaucracy, the other was business. The two institutions differ from each other
in many respects, and are often at loggerheads with each other, but they agree on
one quite seminal thing: they are both bent on the eradication of emotions or at
least keeping them off limit. Since they are enemies of affection, they have both
been hailed since their inception as incarnations of rationality and instruments of
rationalization (Bauman 1996, 45).
Urban Imagery 61

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

Benjamin and Alfred Stieglitz on the Magic of Urban Places

Early sociologies of modernity claim that in the course of the modernisation


process all traces of traditional societies, and especially all references to
magical and suprapersonal forces, were banned from the world. What
62 Keunen

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

3
The modern world appears to us a wasteland of technological or consumption-
targeting artefacts and oppressive crowds, thus resembling more and more the
universe of T.S. Eliots poem of the same title: Unreal City,/ Under the brown fog
of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought
death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,/ And each
man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Urban Imagery 63

natural, but the cradle of modern lifestyleurban modernity. In his


posthumous magnum opus, The Arcades Project, Benjamin shows that the
industrialisation brought about by the capitalist economic system rendered
the world so complex that modern man was forced to start developing
aesthetic strategies of resistance. Modern man casts an aesthetic glance
at the most modern aspects of his daily environment. As is generally
known, Benjamin called the result of this operation of aestheticization
phantasmagoria.4 In a prospectus for the book Das Passagen-Werk,
which he wrote for a French publisher at the end of his life, Benjamin
emphasised that especially the new lifestyle and the new economic and
technological realisations had become the object of a dream worlda
shadow play, the form of storytelling and entertainment fashionable in
eighteenth-century popular culture. Modernity, Benjamin says, is not only
the progressive introduction of rationality and individualism, but also the
reintroduction of mythical forms of thought; it is the world dominated
by its phantasmagorias (Benjamin 1999, 77; see also Cohen 1989,
107). Modernity is a culture that introduces a kind of surreal aesthetics;
what Louis Aragon did with the Parisian arcades and the Parc de Buttes-
Chaumont (as I will argue below) is in fact the very essence of the modern
attitude to urban space. But by contrast with Aragon, Benjamin explicitly
linked this urban space to the economic conditions of our society. In his
view, the phantasmagorical enchantment boils down to a reactivation of
the mythical forces: Der Kapitalismus war eine Naturerscheinung, mit
der ein neuer Traumschlaf ber Europa kam und in ihm eine Reaktivierung
der mythischen Krfte (Capitalism was a natural phenomenon, which
engulfed Europe in a new dream sleep and triggered a reactivation of the
mythical forces, Benjamin 1982, 494; my translation).
From this it is clear that we should consider modernity as a paradoxical
social condition in which seemingly contradictory phenomena do indeed
exist side by side. The stability created in the maelstrom of modern life is
not only that of a rational individualism and its disenchanting side effects,
but also that of an emotional individualism that goes along with new
forms of enchantment. Because the city epitomises modern ambivalence,

4
One could say that the dynamics of capitalist industrialism had caused a curious
reversal in which reality and art switched places. Reality becomes artificial, a
phantasmagoria of commodities and architectural construction made possible by
the new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the proliferation of
such objects, the density of which created an artificial landscape of buildings and
consumer items as totally encompassing as the earlier, natural one (Buck-Morss
1989, 213).
64 Keunen

the paradox is also found in artistic representations of the city: in urban


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

Phantasmagoria: Mythical Affects


in the Space of Modernity

The direct, sensory experience of modernity is at the centre of Walter


Benjamins work. In Benjamins view, images of the modern dream
world (i.e. of cultural creations originating from the capitalist economy
and modern technology) are not the result of a rational, ideological
reflection; on the contrary, it is in the immediate, affective interaction
with his environment that modern man tries to get a grip on modernity:
These creations undergo this illumination not only in a theoretical
manner, by way of an ideological transposition, but in the immediateness
of the perceptible presence (Benjamin 1982, 60). Through his conception
of phantasmagoria as a sensory, direct reaction and his labelling of this
reaction as mythical, Benjamin proves himself a competent reader of his
contemporary, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Although it is far from certain
that Benjamin had read all of the Neo-Kantian philosophers works,5 there
is no doubt that he had acquainted himself with the basic tenets Cassirer
developed on the subject of mythical thinking. According to Cassirer,

5
The only indication of his reading of Cassirer is found in a letter to Hugo von
Hofmannsthal (Benjamin 1995, 1046), on 28 December 1925. Benjamin wrote
that he had read with great interest Cassirers Die Begriffsform im mythischen
Denken, a long lecture published in 1922 in the well-known series Studien der
Bibliothek Warburg.
Urban Imagery 65

mythical man attributes meaning to his perceptions without any form of


reflection whatsoever: meaning attaches to perception itself, in which it
is apprehended and immediately experienced (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 68).
Here, Cassirer even uses the same words as Benjamin, speaking explicitly
about a sensory illumination: the objects in the mythical experience
assume a new meaning, one which they do not simply have from the very
beginning but which they acquire in this form of contemplation, one might
say in this mythical illumination (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 75; see also 49).
Because Benjamin chose a basic principle that is also held by Cassirer, the
terms phantasmagorical and mythical become almost synonymous in
his work. My analysis of the modern experience as an experience heavily
coloured by the mythical in itself is far from new. Benjamin scholars
such as Graeme Gilloch (The metropolis is the principal site of the
phantasmagoria of modernity, the new manifestation of myth; 1996, 11)
and David Frisby (The reality of the nineteenth century was presented
to itself as a phantasmagoria, as a dream world, as a world of illusions, a
mythical world; 1986, 230) also emphasise the mythical nature of modern
culture. Yet they do not specify where we may find the similarities between
old and modern forms of mythical thinking. By taking a step back and
orientating ourselves towards Ernst Cassirer, it becomes possible to lay
bare these similarities and to interpret the modern experience as something
pre-rational, affective.

Mythical Affect in Cassirers Philosophy

According to Cassirer, the essence of mythical imagination is affectivity.


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

man assumes the existence of causal connections between spiritual forces


and the material world.6 This becomes clear when we try to understand
shamanistic religions. To a shaman, Cassirer says ([1925] 1965, 49),
the logic of the world is not governed by objective laws (i.e. scientific
causality), but rather by spirit forces inhabiting the concrete material world
(mythical causality). When a shaman pours out water as a libation during
the rain dance, this water is not just a symbolic representation of real rain
(as it is in modern religions), nor is it a material cause that can exert an
influence on rain clouds (as in scientific thought). Rather it is indissolubly
connected with actual rain, since both are inhabited by the same force or
spirit. To the mythical mind, the world is nothing more than a collection of
material phenomena that are tied up with personalised, spiritual forces; in
its perception, souls and ghosts are ubiquitous and the presence of persons
is sensed through their own intentions, feelings and thoughts. That is why
trees, amulets and other fetish-like objects are considered truly animate
entities.7 In this context it is crucial to interpret objects and situations (e.g.
places) in a correct manner; it is necessary to learn to read the world as
an ever-changing set of physiognomic characters (Cassirer [1929] 1965,
68),8 to interpret the environment as a set of facial expressions.
Mythical thinking is nothing more than the assessment of the emotional
power that emanates from a spatial situation, an object or a person.
As such, this is an everyday and thoroughly unpremeditated mental
operation: in a smiling face, we read a character trait, a positive force. In
a photo of a beloved, we read a good character, good feelings or good
intentions. Similarly, when we experience fear, we see objects or people
around us as radiating a negative force. According to Cassirer, this type of
imagination constitutes the most elementary layer of human knowledge.

6
There is as yet no separation between fundamentally different factors, between
material and spiritual, between physical and psychic. There is only a single
undivided sphere of efficacy, within which a continuous exchange takes place
between the two spheres that we usually distinguish as the world of the soul and the
world of the matter (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 158).
7
All image magic rests on the presupposition that in the image the magician is
not dealing with a dead imitation of the object; rather, in the image, he possesses the
essence, the soul, of the object (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 69).
8
Physiognomy, or the assessment of characteristics through the general outward
appearance of a person, object or situation, was a very fashionable word in
Cassirers day (e.g. the concept was also dear to Walter Benjamin); it involves a
kind of pseudo-scientific knowledge; character traits and the condition of the soul
are read by analysing the physical properties of a given person, object or situation.
Urban Imagery 67

Regardless of whether one lives in a pre-modern tribal community or in


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

Benjamin and Zola: The Auratic Experience of Urban Places

Cassirers theme of mythical logic, of reasoning in terms of physiognomic


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

the experience of the aura... rests on the transfer of reaction common in


human society onto the relationship of the inanimate or of nature to the
human being. The one who is looked at or thinks that he is looked at opens
his gaze. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest the
phenomenon with the faculty to open its gaze. (Benjamin 1974, 64647)

Like Cassirer, Benjamin believed that the affective-mythical interaction


with reality can best be described as the reading of the physiognomic
properties; a soul is ascribed to objects or situations so as to enable them to
look back. It is this definition of the aura which also seems to be used by
Benjamin in developing his concept of phantasmagoria. I would like to
draw upon this concept to interpret urban spaces as spaces that possess an
affective-mythical charge.9 As phantasmagoric spaces, they are to a great
extent emotionally charged, and they speak to us on a pre-rational level.
Artistsas well as ordinary mortals in their everyday aesthetic experience,
for that matterare submitted to powerful aesthetic stimuli, which seem to
cast a spell and create extraordinary spaces that are set apart from a banal
and disenchanted world of functionalism and cold, utilitarian rationality.
Sometimes this involves emotions that are summoned by a threatening
situation and that cause the space to be experienced as unheimlich (scary
or sinister); sometimes it involves affects of fascination and admiration that
confer a sublime quality on the modern space.
The above can be demonstrated by means of some examples drawn
from urban literature. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos,
Alfred Dblin or Emile Zola were not just expressing their opinions on the
modern spaces in their urban novels; they also succeeded in embodying
the experience of modernity in their city descriptions. Their portrayals
of the urban condition incarnated the experience of the modern in both
its fascinating and frightening aspects. They showed how concrete
consciousnesses stand in awe of these mysterious modern phenomena,
much like the sacred is experienced as a mysterium tremendum et
fascinosum. In other words, they rendered consciousness mythical. In his
Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola often made use of what could be called a

9
From the classic definition of the aura conceptin The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (1936)we learn that Benjamin was inclined, as I am in
this text, to link the auratic experience with the perception of space. What, then,
is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance,
however near it may be. To follow with the eyewhile resting on a summer
afternoona mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts a shadow on the
beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch (Benjamin 2002,
104105).
Urban Imagery 69

physiognomic method to report on the experience of hypermodern (for


that time, at least) spaces and objects: he describes the forces that modern
phenomena express and the affective imprint they leave on observers
consciousnesses.
In La bte humaine (1890), for instance, a railroad yard gradually comes
to life and develops into an almost gothic setting. By anthropomorphising
the trains in the railroad yard, Zola manages to render palpable the almost
mythical fascination of modern man for this new technology.10 In Au
bonheur des dames (1883), Zola describes a similar experience. Department
stores, which came into being in the second half of the century, were also
emotionally charged phenomena. In them, commodities, the masses and
imposing architecture joined forces to create a spectacle that acquired an
almost sacral connotation for a visitor coming from the provinces.11 In
Zolas animated descriptions of modernist spaces, we can clearly see how
phantasmagoric imagination interacts with concrete places. As in mythical
thinking, space is not composed of discrete objects, but rather of the diverse
forces that animate these objects. Since one and the same force can inhabit
several objects (that is, since this force can transform itself), the boundaries
between these objects blur: they melt into each other.12 Zola offers a fine

10
A cause dun encombrement, on navait pu loger ce train sous la marquise des
grandes lignes. Il attendait au plein air, contre le quai qui se prolongeait en une sorte
de jete troite, dans les tnbres dun ciel dencre, o la file des quelques becs de
gaz, plants le long du trottoir, nalignait que des toiles fumeuses. Cela tait
immense et triste, noy deau, et l piqu dun feu sanglant, confusment peupl
de masses opaques, les machines et les wagons solitaires, les tronons de trains
dormant sur les voies de garage; et, du fond de ce lac dombre, des bruits arrivaient,
des respirations gantes, haletantes de fivre, des coups de sifflet pareils des cris
aigus de femmes quon violente, des trompes lointaines sonnant, lamentables, au
milieu du grondement des rues voisines. Il y eut des ordres voix haute, pour quon
ajoutt une voiture. Immobile, la machine de lexpress perdait par une soupape un
grand jet de vapeur qui montait dans tout ce noir, o elle seffiloquait en petites
fumes, semant de larmes blanches le deuil sans bornes tendu au ciel (Zola 1890).
11
Alors, Denise eut la sensation dune machine, fonctionnant haute pression, et
dont le branle aurait gagn jusquaux talages. Ce ntaient plus les vitrines froides
de la matine; maintenant, elles paraissaient comme chauffes et vibrantes de la
trpidation intrieure. Du monde les regardait, des femmes arrtes scrasaient
devant les glaces, toute une foule brutale de convoitise (Zola 1883).
12
Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an
unequivocal relation between specific causes and specific effects, mythical
thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection
of causes at its disposal. Anything can come from anything. Whereas empirical
70 Keunen

example of this when he describes a market hall as transforming into


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

The way in which the modern space is charged with meanings of an


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

Fictional Heterotopias: Enchanted Places


in the Disenchanted Space of Modernity
Anthropomorphizing the modern space, and the physiognomic reading
this entails, constitutes a purely aesthetic strategy, one of unconsciously
reacting to the chaotic experience of modernity. However, the history of
art and literature has revealed other artistic strategies that expressly broach

thinking speaks of change and seeks to understand it on the basis of a universal


rule, mythical thinking knows only a simple metamorphosis (Cassirer [1925]
1955, 46).
Urban Imagery 71

the matter of the opposition between enchantment and disenchantment.


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

Cassirer and Foucault: Enchanting Places


in a Disenchanted Space

According to Cassirer, the mythical view of spatiality is the most


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

commonplace, forms its own ring of existence, a walled-in zone separated


from its surroundings by fixed limits (ibid., 103). Mythical perception, in
other words, is characterised by a logic of containment that differentiates
between spaces of inside and outside, inward and outward (ibid., 99).14
Although it may appear that sacred places are no longer relevant to
a modern society, it suffices to call upon the work of Michel Foucault to
demonstrate that in every culture and every era, spaces are being demarcated
that are of vital importance to the survival of a society: There are also, and
this probably in all culture, in all civilization, real places, effective places,
places that are written into the institution of society itself, and that are a sort
of counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias (Foucault
[1967] 2008, 17). At first glance, the examples of such places that are
outside all places offered by Foucault may seem very diverse. They all
share one property, however: they are enclosed places that procure an
affective charge different from all external spaces. Examples are the places
where people, in primitive cultures, live through personal crises (such
as going through menstruation in isolated places or retreating with a group
of youngsters in anticipation of an initiation rite), churchyards (because
here, human culture is governed by the afterlife or by the transition from
the corporeal to the spiritual), the cinema (where the fourth wall transports
a group of people into a fictional reality that is subsequently experienced
collectively), a library (where all the worlds of cultural history flow
together to be experienced), holiday villages (which offer a refuge from
the hectic chaos of the city in an everlasting and rippling present), prisons,
purification spaces such as saunas, rendezvous rooms in American motels,
seventeenth-century colonial cities and cruise ships.
At the end of the1960s, Foucault coined a term which would allow him
14
Myth arrives at spatial determinations and differentiations only by lending
a peculiar mythical accent to each region in space, to the here and there, the
rising and setting of the sun, the above and below. Space is now divided into
definitive zones and directions. . . not yet a homogeneous whole, within which the
particular determinations are equivalent and interchangeable. The near and far,
the high and low, the right and leftall have their uniqueness, their special mode
of magical significance. Not only is the basic opposition of sacred and profane
interwoven with all these spatial oppositions; it actually constitutes and produces
them. . . . The different directions in mythical space are not conceptual or intuitive
relationsthey are independent entities, endowed with demonic powers. One must
immerse oneself in the artistic representations of the gods and the demons of the
directions in order wholly to feel this expressive meaning, this physiognomic
character which all spatial determinations possess for the mythical consciousness
(Cassirer [1929] 1965, 150).
Urban Imagery 73

to reflect upon and interpret these spaces and which became very popular
in Urban Studies, as well as among philosophers of culture (partly thanks
to Edward Soja):15 heterotopias. The concept of heterotopia was intended
to designate those spaces that make the difference, spaces that elevate
themselves above the indifferent places with which we are confronted on
a daily basis and which hold a strong affective appeal for members of the
culture in question. Such places are something like counter-sites, a kind of
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that
can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted (Foucault [1967] 2008, 17). Foucault makes it clear that
he considers such places to be related to the lived spaces that form the
object of inquiry of phenomenological philosophy. Pioneering work in
this field was carried out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and especially by
Gaston Bachelard.16 Yet Foucault is not so interested in spaces that create
individual moments of experience. It is the spaces that are collectively
experienced that draw his attention. The heterotopic space comes close
to the sacral places that Cassirer viewed as typical of mythically-thinking
cultures. Foucault himself, who mentions a sort of simultaneously mythic
and real contestation of the space in which we live, hints at this relation.
Furthermore, in the relations of tension between the heterotopic and the
everyday, he observes a certain dynamic that he calls sacral. He points
to the tensions between private space and public space, between family
space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between
the space of leisure and that of work and concludes that, apart from
considering these as simple givens, modern man also believes that they
are animated by an unspoken sacralization (Foucault [1967] 2008, 16).
Finally, Foucaults description of a heterotopia demonstrates the same
logic of containment found in Cassirers analysis of the myth. It is this
logic in which I am especially interested. A heterotopic place originates

15
All these places share a deviating structure of experience, which is connected
with the functioning of human imagination. Some places generate an experience
in which, apart from the empirical, imagination also leaves its mark. Heterotopias
bring out differences between empirical reality (or constructions of this reality) and
spaces charged with imagination. It is no accident that Soja (1996) dedicated an
entire chapter to heterotopia in Thirdspace, because it is in this book that he goes in
search of real-and-imagined places.
16
Bachelards monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have
taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary
in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as
well (Foucault [1967] 2008, 16).
74 Keunen

because the spatial setting is partly closed, upon which the enclosed place
starts to communicate in a peculiar way with the space that lies outside.
The difference mainly resides in the fact that the individual behaves in a
deviating manner inside the created inner space: a different temporal
regime (called heterochrony)17 is obtained, and certain conditions need to
be met in order to be able to participate in the activities within this space
(as such, it is a semi-public space that mildly restricts the private sphere).
Within this enclosed space material things acquire a different meaning, one
which possesses a powerful affective charge. Some writers commenting on
Foucault are therefore right to associate the heterotopic space with affects
of a mythical-religious nature.18 Like religious, sacral spaces, heterotopic
places are fascinating and enchanting; they constitute places in which the
individual is able to rise temporarily above the empirical world through
affects that are experienced as singular or exceptional.
The connection between the mythical experience and Foucaults
heterotopias is all the more interesting because it enables us to view the
mythical experience as a deviating experience that is highly relevant to
modern man; heterotopic spaces function as a critical or compensatory tool
for countering a surplus of modernity. It is no accident that modern literary
men have a predilection for heterotopias in the sense attributed to them by
Foucault; they are in fact searching for strong representations in order
to gain control over the complexity of the modern world and single out
enchanted zones from the ordinary world to evoke a direct affect of the

17
Time constitutes an essential component of this epistemic construction: The
heterotopia begins to function fully when people find themselves in a sort of
absolute break with their traditional time (Foucault [1967] 2008, 20). Because this
essentially involves spatio-temporal constructions, a comparison with Bakhtins
concept of the chronotope becomes a logical next step. On the relation between
phantasmagoria, heterotopia and chronotopy, see Keunen 2011 and Keunen and
Verraest 2012.
18
The English word holiday has kept this reference to the holy origin of free
time, rest and repose. Similarly to the way in which heterotopia interrupts the
continuity of space, the holiday interrupts the continuity of time. Holidays, being
extraordinary as opposed to the mundane, ordinary character of the everyday, are
the permanent markers of the discontinuous moments on the calendar, pacing the
continuous flow of everyday experience. Heterotopia is the counterpart of what an
event is in time, an eruption, an apparition, an absolute discontinuity, taking on its
heterotopian character at those times when the event in question is made permanent
and translated into a specific architecture.... Thus, heterotopia can be said to be
holyday space. Most of Foucaults examples have this quality (De Cauter and
Dehaene 2008, 92).
Urban Imagery 75

extraordinary and, with it, an inside/outside contrast. Whoever believes that


only scientific knowledge is capable of making complexity controllable
should realise that many complex situations cannotor can barelybe
solved by means of numerical thought. In many cases, and especially in
situations that bear a strong affective charge, only myth and art can bring
illumination. They enable us to react to fictional places much as we
would react to real places in lived experience. The simulated experience of
heterotopian places, in particular, generates a reaction that seems to have a
surplus value for coping with modernity.

Spatial Containment Strategies


in the History of Urban Literature

In literature, the logic of containment of a heterotopic space assumes two


shapes, corresponding to what, in Foucaults view, constitutes the function
of a heterotopia.19 In accordance with the first function, the enclosed space
operates as a place where everyday norms and habits are temporarily
suspended; for this reason, the heterotopic space can function as a symbol
of illusions. It shows that everyday spaces in the outside world entail the
same illusory representations as those staged in the heterotopia. Such spaces
are the opposite of normalisation, the opposite of the rationalised behaviour
that Weber and Simmel considered essential to modern culture. Here we
should think of extraordinary places, such as cinemas, theatres and
brothelsplaces of wish fulfilment that offer possibilities for subversion,
heterogeneity and excess.20 In a lucid comment, Boyer says that these
places contest by creating an illusory space that dissipates and denounces

19
The last trait of heterotopias is that they have, in relation to the rest of space, a
function. The latter unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create
a space of illusion that exposes all real space, all the emplacements in the interior
of which human life is enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory. Perhaps
that is the role played for a long time by those famous brothels of which we are
now deprived. Or else, on the contrary, creating another space, another real space,
as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and
sketchy. This would be the heterotopia not of illusion, but of compensation, and I
wonder if certain colonies have not somewhat functioned in this manner (Foucault
[1967] 2008, 21).
20
The notion of the carnivalesque in Bakhtins oeuvre has the same connotations;
see Mikhail Bakhtins Rabelais study ([1965] 1984) and the study by Stallybrass
and White on places of transgression (1986).
76 Keunen

bourgeois reality by showing it to be the real illusion (Boyer 2008, 54).


When the heterotopia exercises its second function, it will appear as a place
where compensatory activities are made possible; in this case, the place
accommodates activities that are no longer possible in the outside world.
Such a heterotopia of compensation constructs another space that functions
as a contesting counter-site; it constructs a different and at the same time
perfect space, which serves ersatz for the normal space (experienced as
chaotic). In the past, colonial cities were experienced in this manner; they
demonstrated a desire to make a clean sweep with the past and to create, in
a systematic way and more in keeping with authentic values, a new place
to live.
The classic example of a fictionalised heterotopia of illusion can be
found in Aragons Le paysan de Paris (see Keunen 2000). In this chef-
doeuvre of surrealist prose, which Benjamin called the best illustration
of his concept of phantasmagoria, the author uses two Parisian places that
fit the definition of heterotopia: the arcades of le passage de lOpra and
the late nineteenth-century example of English garden architecture in the
northeast of Paris, le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Both places function as
heterotopias of illusion. The narrator explicitly calls these des lieux sacrs
(holy places); he is an oneiric stroller who embarks upon a flamboyant
quest for the sacral places of modernity. Religious vocabulary (holiness,
rites, cult, temple) dominates Aragons text. The places are sacral to the
surrealist because in them the experience of le merveilleux (the marvellous)
can occur; they assist him in overcoming the limitations and are un
moyen daccder au-del de mes forces un domaine encore interdit (a
means of going beyond the limits of my power and gaining access to a
still-forbidden domain, Aragon [1926] 1966, 109, my translation). In this
respect, we are positively concerned with places of illusion, places where
bourgeois rationality is transcended in an aesthetic, in this case a surrealist,
experience. The first holy place, the arcaded passage to the Opra Le
Peletier, is compared by the narrator to an undersea world and to aquariums
humains, in which a lueur glauque (a bleak light) reigns, because the light
is filtered through the glass ceiling (ibid., 21). The passage is a dusky
place in which light and darkness are both present. Hence, the passages
condition is compared to a state of dreaming: le passage onirique (the
dreamy passage). The second part of Le paysan explores a second sacral
space, the Buttes-Chaumont park. This public space is also a source of
surreality: parc, parc, et parc. Voici lappartement des rves (park, park,
and park. This is the apartment of dreams, ibid., 222). It is clear from the
description of the park that it is a holy site in which the ambiguous state
Urban Imagery 77

of dreaming is stimulated. In the nocturnal park, even though lighted by


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

21
In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard describes how the perception of the postmodern
78 Keunen

heterotopias of the early twentieth century, modern literary history is rich


with other sacral spaces. Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, for
instance, show a clear focus on spaces that reflect the illusions of a group or
of a whole community. Zola specialised in just this sort of space. Examples
that come to mind are the temple of wealth erected in the centre of Paris
by the middle class (the central market halls, which play a leading part Le
Ventre de Paris), the holy spaces of modern transport (the railroad station
in La bte humaine), the church of consumerist society (the department
store in Au bonheur de dames) and the temple of financial speculation (the
stock exchange in LArgent). Such spaces also constitute heterotopias of
illusion, because they condense the forces of the process of modernisation
in their enclosed world. For this reason, they can be mobilised as tools for
contesting the illusions of modernity.
Let us now turn to the second mode of fictional world creation, the
construction of a heterotopia of compensation, which can be theoretically
analysed by studying the construction of the highly aestheticized places
found in impressionist and symbolist literary works. Central to this form
of world construction is the processing of subjective impressions. Although
impressionistic cityscapes are found in the work of Balzac, it is actually
from the late 1860s on that descriptions of shifting modes of visual
perception become dominant (Caramaschi 1977, 59). This period initiates
an explosion of urban representations depicting a sensory environment that
seems permeated with powerful emotions. The urban places appear to be
chosen because of their compensatory function. By depicting an intensely
aestheticized environment, the authors attempted to find an equilibrium
for the alienating, disenchanted world of modernity. This heterotopia of
compensation finds its strongest expression in George Rodenbachs Bruges
la morte (1892), in which the moribund, foggy city (with its deserted
streets, squares and parks and its lonely figures against a dark background)
displays a medieval stillness that correlates with the suffering, the confusion
and sometimes the redemption of the main character. In Rodenbachs
novel, the lived experience of the fictional city is used to evoke a contrast
with the world beyond the heterotopian environment. The same kind of

subject is determined by hyper-real transformations of everyday situations. He


starts from the observation that hyper-reality is no longer an artistic construct or
an extraordinary experience linked to special circumstances and to gifted observers
(aesthetes such as Aragon and Breton, who turn the Parisian shopping arcades into
oneiric spaces). In the view of Baudrillard, the hyper-real has now become part of
quotidian reality. My use of the term hyper-reality refers to its original, historical
meaning.
Urban Imagery 79

spatial construction is also found in symbolist poetry and lyrical prose


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

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

Conclusion

I would like to conclude that the problem of enchanting modernity


opens up some interesting perspectives for contemporary cultural theory.
Provided one is fully alive to the affectively charged worlds, the study of
literary imagination may become an important tool in our understanding of
western culture. Through literature, for example, and specifically through
the spatial symbols found in literature, we can illustrate modern mans
affective investment in his world. Literary imagination shows us what is at
work in modern mans perception and experience.
The relevance of the study of magical experiences evoked by modern
myths, and of illusory or compensatory heterotopic spaces, is not limited to
the objective of understanding literary history or of gaining insight into the
relationship between modernity and experience in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Quite the contrary. The historical examples exhibit
numerous analogies with the way in which late-modern man in the twenty-
first century deals with place and space. In a world in which space appears
to shrink to a global village of telecommunications and a spaceship earth
of economic and ecological interdependencies, in which time horizons
shorten to the point where the present is all there is and in which we have
to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our
Urban Imagery 81

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

Translated by Jo Smets.
82 Keunen

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How Cultural? How Material? Rereading
the Slums of Early Victorian London

Jason Finch

Introduction

In approaching the spatial zone which in 180050 began to be known as the


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

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

Discursive Construction and Material Particularity:


Approaches to the London Slum of the Long Victorian
Era, 18201960

Today, according to Mike Davis (2006), we live on a Planet of Slums. In


2011, it was estimated that a sixth of the worlds population, some 954
million people, were living in slums (Greenemeier 2011). The importance
of the slum as an object of study has to be apparent. And it was in London,
during the early nineteenth century that the word slum and the very concept
of the slum that we have today emerged (OED 2012; see also Dyos 1982,
13032). Between then and the era of the British Empires break-up after
the Second World War, the slum as a concept shifted from being seen
until approximately 1860 as an inseparable part of a city, to a shamefully
large series of zones frequently explained through metaphors of disease
Rereading the London Slums 87

(a widespread view between about 1860 and 1910), to something which


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

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


and inhumane invasion of working-class districts.
London has a peculiar and unique importance in the history of the
concept of the slum. First of all, throughout the century from 1825 to
1925, it was by any measure the largest city on earth (Wikipedia 2012b).
Secondly, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth, it was the metropolitan hub of the British Empire, which in
1921 had the greatest territorial extent of any empire in history so far. And
thirdly, the 1851 Census revealed that, differently from ever before, the
majority of the United Kingdoms population lived not in the countryside
but in cities. Excepting city states, this was a world first.
Temporality matters. This fact is obscured in some influential readings
of Londons imaginative geography, notably the psychogeography of
Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and others. In work distantly echoing that
of French writers such as Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and Georges
Perec, Ackroyd (2003, 188206, especially 197) juxtaposes photographs
and anecdotes to suggest that poverty shadows London in the early twenty-
first century precisely as it did 200 years previously. It is certainly tempting
to compare the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, say, with the violent
events of 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London,
and Ackroyd (2000, 48496) does just this. They share things: London
today is a gigantic, confusing metropolis and it was already that in 1780.
Legitimate grievances and deeply-held beliefs merge on these occasions
with blood-lust, avarice, and sheer destructiveness. Those responsible are
often the most disadvantaged in society, but seen as a mass can appear a
terrifying bunch of criminals. And there is at times a disturbing power to
predict latent in Ackroyds words:
[i]n a city based upon money and power, those who are moneyless and
powerless are peculiarly oppressed. In London, of all cities, they are
literally degraded, stripped of all human decency by the operations of a city
that has no other purpose except greed. (Ackroyd 2003, 189)

These words were written in the late 1990s. A decade and more on, they
seem to anticipate the death in 2009 of the homeless newspaper seller Ian
Tomlinson at the hands of a policeman trained to deal ferociously with
urban disorder (see BBC 2011). Evocative words, but they blur temporal
distinctions. Has London always been based upon money and power in
precisely the same way it is said to be now? Moreover there is a problem
with a phrase like of all cities: it plays into the hands of Londoners overly
satisfied by notions of their citys exceptionality. Ackroyd attributes to
Rereading the London Slums 89

London a mystical, trans-historical unity and needs handling with care.


Understanding the discursive history of the London slums in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as precisely that, a history, involves
relations of literary influence. George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, writing
in the 1880s and 90s, were actually unable to describe the slums without in
some sense being Dickensian (on Gissings London in relation to Dickenss
see Tambling 2009, 25973). But the writing of such a history also involves
an appreciation of changes that often come from far outside the literary realm.

From Northanger Abbey to the Rookery:


The City as Source of Fear, 17901850

By the end of the 1840s, the living conditions of the urban poor had come
to be understood by the more progressive sections of the English political
classes as a scandal. Improvement became a mainstream goal. Newspapers
such as The Times and literary writers such as Charles Dickens after 1835
frequently drew attention to the squalid lives of the urban poor (Flint 1987,
14854). The statements to be found in such sources are rhetorical. They
were designed to move an audience and so lead to changes in attitude and
policy. Here, it is worth recalling the scepticism of the geographer Owens
and the archaeologist Jeffries, taking their cue from the urban historian
Alan Mayne (2011) with his materialist, anti-culturalist stance. All three of
these researchers argue that rhetorical statements of the sort just described,
such as those of Dickens or the leader writers of The Times, are likely to be
extremely unreliable when it comes to grasping what the living conditions
of the poor in early Victorian London were actually like. For literary
scholars the most rhetorically powerful statements made in any given
time and place are always likely to be heard the most clearly, and there is
therefore an especial need for literary scholars to exercise caution here. As
Denford (1995, 2) points out, later writers on the Victorian slum frequently
merely recycle the words of Victorian commentators.
Between the period of the French Revolutionary Wars and the middle
of the nineteenth century, fears that disease and disorder might come
from the slums and affect the rest of the city increased. Epidemics of
cholera and typhus periodically struck London, and in the first half of the
nineteenth century they were thought to be emanating from the poorest,
most overcrowded and least hygienic districts, the so-called fever-nests
(Hardy 1993, 221). Alongside fears of pestilence came the fear of political
disorder and violence exploding out of the same districts into not just the
90 Finch

city but even, potentially, the country beyond.


Such fears are well embodied in Jane Austens Northanger Abbey,
written in the late 1790s and then revised in 1809, but not published until
after Austens death in 1817 (Butler 1995, xixv). There, Miss Tilney hears
Catherine Morlands excited statement that something very shocking
indeed will soon come out in London and leaps to the conclusion that
a dreadful riot is about to begin in the capital (Austen [1817] 1995,
1078). In fact, Catherine is looking forward to the next shocking literary
productions to be published in the metropolis then distributed in the
provinces. No direct connection is drawn in Northanger Abbey between
social unrest and the very poorest districts, but there is an association
between Gothic fiction, the genre with which Catherine gets so carried
away in Austens novelwhat Miss Tilneys brother Henry calls the riot
. . . in your own brainand the at least potentially terrifying disorder and
violence of the metropolis. The conversation in Northanger Abbey, which
takes place in a county far from London, shows how ideas of the slum
could be culturally constructed far from material realities, and it is not hard
to imagine how such constructions could then come to influence the actions
of policy-makers and so return to affect actual locations.
By the 1840s, London slums were embodied as a zone for newspapers
and their readers then by the notorious Rookery of St Giles. Areas like this
could seem to be beyond description. The Times in July 1849 referred to
Carrier Street in St Giles as perhaps the most disgustingly filthy spot that
exists anywhere in London, describing the entrance to one staircase in a
court there as so offensive, so repulsive to every sense, as to render it
impossible to give any idea of it (quoted in Flint 1987, 151). The Rookery
occupied a site today just south of the British Museum and Bloomsbury,
on the northern fringes of todays West End of London. Respectable local
resident Joseph Banks Durham wrote in 1850 that: it is quite impossible
for any description, however full, to give to any one an adequate idea of its
filth and misery, and the moral degradation of its inhabitants (Flint 1987,
155). Durham was a successful cutler on a broad new street which occupied
part of the former site of the Rookery. There, he produced elaborate and
ornamental metalwork items including a chatelaine exhibited at the 1851
Great Exhibition (see Victoria and Albert Museum 2011). He seems to
have been genuinely concerned about the plight of his more impoverished
and desperate neighbours, but he also depended for his income on
wealthy clients including members of the aristocracy and landed gentry.
Landowning wealth in Victorian England relied increasingly on urban
revenues (Dyos and Reeder 1973, 370), but those who profited from the
Rereading the London Slums 91

slums also had a great fear of what Durham called moral degradation,
something felt increasingly after about 1820 to emanate from the most
over-crowded and rack-rented inner-city zones.
St Giles was proverbially opposed to fashionable St James. In the
mid-1840s Douglas Jerrold wrote The History of St Giles and St James
(James 2006, 12425; Flint 1987, 131). The two parishes were conceived
as the opposite poles in what was called, in opposition to the mercantile
City of London, the town: lowest and highest. An 1824 map of the
Russell familys London estate shows the radical contrast between the
crooked, cramped streets of St Giles, and the spacious squares and avenues
of its neighbouring parish of St Georges, better known as Bloomsbury
(reproduced in Whitfield 2006, 138). Middle-class Londoners perceptions
of the St Giles Rookery (in fact a tiny knot of streets within a diverse if
not especially well-favoured parish) were tied to moral panics about the
supposed barbarism and over-breeding of the Catholic Irish who were said
to be its main inhabitants. Nine-tenths of the inhabitants are Irish wrote
the unsensational and sympathetic clergyman observer Thomas Beames in
1850 (Flint 1987, 143). Material realities affected cultural constructions:
clothes if nothing else made the St Giles dweller visible the moment he or
she stepped into Bloomsbury.
Todays study of material culture, meanwhile, can call into question
the apparent certainties constructed culturally. Between 2006 and 2008,
archaeological excavations complicated the picture of St Giles provided by
nineteenth-century texts. The digs indicated just how varied the lives lived
in St Giles were, even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
when it was most stigmatised (Anthony 2011). Archaeology and the arts are
going in directions not so far taken by literary studies. A fascinating 2011
collaborative exhibition by the artist Jane Palm-Gold and the archaeologist
Jeffries combines empirical and imaginative means of grasping the actual
life of the slums, the minds and hearts inside the three-dimensional
obscenities (Palm-Gold 2011). Allied work at Spitalfields supports the
point that districts which could be notorious among outsiders were home
as well to real people who smoked pipes, drank tea, nursed babies and had
hobbies (Veder 2009; Owens 2010).

Pierce Egan: Callousness and Vigour

One representative of the earlier phase of nineteenth-century London slum


writing is Pierce Egan, author of Life in London ([1821] 2007). Egan is
92 Finch

perhaps best-known for juxtaposing high life and low life, with the latter
not the homes and streets of the poorest, but the lively pits of vice
gambling dens, boxing matchesin which Regency London males of
different classes mixed (for a recent account see Sen 2008, 9396). As the
century went on, writers on the slums moved further and further away from
the callous merriness about urban violence, starvation and substance abuse
to be encountered in Egan.
Like most successors in the field Egan, as well as setting out to inform
and entertain, had a moral and social agenda. This involved, in the words of
a biographer, setting the misery of low life against the prodigal waste and
folly of high society (Brailsford 2004). But Egans work differs radically
in tone from that of Dickens and other successors. The first chapters of Life
in London concentrate on London places in which finery rather than rags
are seen: places such as Hyde Park and Bond Street, which are devoted to
fashion and the display or pretence of high social position. Fashion, Egan
writes,
makes one adventurer forget that the clothes in which he hopes to obtain
respect and attention, are more than likely to be paid for in Newgate;
another for a time forgets that John Doe and Richard Roe have expelled him
from his lodgings; and a third that all his worldly possessions are not equal
to the cost of a dinner. (Egan [1821] 2007, Vol. I, Ch. VII)

Massive numbers of people, an unprecedented proportion of the countrys


population, were indeed trying out the move to London during the period
when Egan was writing (Dyos 1982, 143).
Unlike most of the later writers on the London slums, Egan highlights
not the differences but the similarities between high and low in society,
presenting lords and dandies side by side with pugilists and prostitutes.
They coexist. For Sambudha Sen (2008, 96), Egans juxtapositional
impulse, his depiction of the proximity of wildly different sorts of people in
London, places him square in a tradition connecting Hogarth and Dickens.
But Egans is not at all the sort of connectedness argued for by Dickens
in Bleak House thirty years after Life in London, in which the presence of
the low (Jo the crossing sweeper) undercuts and questions the authority
of the high (Sir Leicester Dedlock). Dickensian connectedness might be
described as a sort of Bakhtinian relativisation. Jo and Sir Leicester make
readers, in the words of Bakhtins editor Michael Holquist (1981, 427),
aware of competing definitions of the same things, in this case that of
a person in modern English society. Egan, instead, emphasises not the
obscene distance separating rich and poor, but their closeness: that the man
Rereading the London Slums 93

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

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

A culturalist reading might concentrate on the Irishmans manner of


speaking, which recalls the merry if somewhat racist Irish bull style of
humour to be found in writers such as Sterne and Edgeworth. This way
cultural stereotyping lies, the argument would run: representations such
as this pigeon-hole other Irish people. Egans view of this particular
immigrant, however, resembles one widespread in London today. The
hod-carrier is not monstrously threatening but an invigorating newcomer
whose very presence and work indicates the dynamism and success of the
expanding, transforming city. The admirable self-confidence of Egans
Irish labourer makes him unlike literary slum-dwellers of the second half of
the nineteenth century, characters such as Dickenss Jo and Dickie Perrott,
Morrisons Child of the Jago, both of whom seem created to arouse pathos.
But culturalist readings would tend to conceal this.
Rereading the London Slums 95

Slum Gothic

Among those who used the Gothic in an attempt to grasp the monstrous,
mysterious London of the second quarter of the century, writers such
as Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth drew on French writing set in a pre-
Haussmann Paris: the Mysteries of Paris of Eugne Sue; what Ian Duncan
(2011, 16062) has labelled Victor Hugos radical re-Gothicisation of a
past Paris. G.W.M. Reynolds, author of The Mysteries of London (184448),
aimed at a cash-strapped audience and used the Gothic even more boldly
crudely, one might instead sayto delineate the slums of London. The
Mysteries of London, Louis James (2006, 13637; 159; see also James 2008)
writes, was published, in weekly numbers with sensational woodcuts,
by George Vickers, a publisher specializing in pornographic and radical
works and may have been the most popular single Victorian work of
fiction. We are certainly on less respectable ground here than we are with
Dickens, instalments of whose novels cost a shilling, twelve times as much
as the penny needed for a chunk of Reynolds. In the opening chapters of The
Mysteries of London Reynolds ([184448] 2012) plunges a sixteen-year-old
youth notable for the extreme effeminacy and juvenile loveliness of his
countenance into that labyrinth of narrow and dirty streets which lies in
the immediate vicinity of the north-western angle of Smithfield market.
So far, so Dickensian. In Oliver Twist, to take only a few examples,
we hear of the intricate and dirty ways between Grays Inn Lane and
Smithfield, and the dark and winding ways between Saffron Hill,
precisely the district into which Reynolds takes his readers in the opening
chapter of The Mysteries of London, and Bow Street, the base of law
enforcement, situated very close to the St Giles Rookery and the other most
infamous slums of northern and western central London then (Dickens
[183739] 1966, 42.378, 43.393, hereafter OT, first number chapter
number and second number page number). Reynolds seems to be following
even more closely the moment when Oliver is seized by Fagins gang
after leaving Mr Brownlows house on an errand. At that point, Oliver is
taken by the gang along the precise spatial reverse of the route taken by
Reynoldss effeminate adolescent, as they move from a labyrinth of dark
narrow courts (OT 15.158) in the Saffron Hill district, into a large open
space (OT 16.158) which turns out to be West Smithfield (site of Londons
great livestock market).
Descriptions of this sort in Dickens derive not only from textual
influence but also, vitally, from physical engagement with, to recall Bill
Brown (2003), the city and its individual districts as object matter.
96 Finch

I thought I knew something of the town but after a little talk with Dickens
I realised I knew nothing, a colleague, George Lear, wrote in the 1830s:
[h]e knew it all from Bow to Brentford (quoted in Slater 2011). Dickenss
claims to know the massive city inside out are well-known to Dickens
scholars. But contexts, for todays post-Derridean culturalist Dickens
critics (see e.g. Ledger and Furneaux 2011), continue predominantly to
be textual ones, and even if this includes statistics and the reports written
by contemporaries on social conditions, precious little attempt is made to
reproduce the experiential nature of the world inhabited by Dickens and his
contemporaries.
Reynolds gets closer than Dickens does to the tone and techniques
of earlier Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe. His teenage characters
experience in the Saffron Hill slums is described as a terrible waking
dream:
Meantime the lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled; and at length the
rain poured down in torrents. Obeying a mechanical impulse, the youth
rushed up the steps of a house at the end of one of those dark, narrow and
dirty streets the ominous appearance of which was every now and then
revealed to him by a light streaming from a narrow window, or the glare of
the lightning. (Reynolds [184448] 2012, Vol. 1, Ch. 1)

Radcliffes heroines have their nightmarish experiences in settings


reminiscent of Salvator Rosa paintings: ruined castles and monasteries in
mountainous parts of southern Europe during the seventeenth century, the
moonlight and lightning illuminating the woods outside. We could consider
the first few paragraphs of Chapter 4 in Radcliffes Mysteries of Udolpho,
first published in 1794: she turned her attention to the heavens, where
the vivid lightnings darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the
woods below. Reynoldss text, as its title announces, offers both a contrast
and a comparison with Radcliffe, stating that the things her heroines
experience can be experienced right here in London, and right now as well.
The use of Gothic fiction in the construction of an image of the London
slums during the 1840s by Reynolds and others welcomes a culturalist
reading, since Gothic novels described, with extensive use of hyperbole,
places that their authors and readers alike had never visited. Yet think once
more of gas street lighting, pioneered in London during these decades. It
must have created a shocking experience of chiaroscuro in which contrasts
between areas of light and darkness were exaggerated. There may have
been material reasons why the 1840s city seemed so hospitable to portrayal
in the Gothic mode.
Rereading the London Slums 97

Two Dickenses

Readers of Dickens once tended to exaggerate his materiality, or in other


words the direct link between his texts and the non-textual world: what was
understood as his realism. More recently, Dickens criticism has done the
opposite and overvalued the textual-cultural at the expense of the material.
As Michael Slater (2004) writes, [t]he general concept of Victorian
London derives in great measure from Dickenss elaborate, haunting
descriptions of labyrinthine courts and alleyways, quaint old buildings,
fogs, gaslight, and teeming street life. An iconic notion of the slum is
so constructed, and the poor housing of other cities at other times can
be compared with this standard or pattern. While they may question
understandings of ordinary peoples lives in nineteenth-century London
which are reliant on the narrative conventions of the time, Alastair
Owens and geographer and archaeologist collaborators (2010, 212, 222
23) nevertheless find themselves turning back to Dickens in their attempt
to capture the atmosphere of Limehouse in riverside east London. Recent
Dickens criticism has not ignored the seamier urban settings and characters
of his novels (Sasaki 2011, 56), but it has tended to be more oriented
towards constructions, for instance of sexuality, than actual socially-
embedded lives. Holly Furneaux and Anne Schwan have argued that
Dickens needs to be seen as less respectable, more subversivequeerer
than he has tended to be seen in Britain at least where, they claim (2005,
1), the diversity of this alleged champion of respectable fiction has
gone largely unnoticed.
The sort of criticism practised by Furneaux and Schwan emphasises that
the slums are places where children are sexualised, places of hidden desires
and illicit commerce. An example is Chapter 6 of Dickenss Dombey and
Son, first published in instalments between October 1846 and April 1848.
Here, Florence Dombey, aged eight or so, is tricked into a slum which
seems not to be a collection of crumbling old houses rammed with short-
term tenants, but instead a favela-type development, and is certainly further
north, further from central London than St Giles, somewhereas Jeremy
Tambling (2009, 113) has recently pointed outthat resembles Agar Town:
[t]hey had not gone very far, but had gone by some very uncomfortable
places, such as brick-fields and tile-yards, when the old woman turned
down a dirty lane, where the mud lay in deep black ruts in the middle of the
road (Dickens [184648] 1974, 6.73, hereafter D&S, first number chapter
number and second number page number; see also the 1851 account of
Agar Town in Dickenss periodical Household Words, Flint 1987, 21822).
98 Finch

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

Of course, conventions change: House, writing for Oxford University Press


in the 1940s, could hardly have written the word shit, although it may have
entered his head.
Approaches such as Houses would forty years on be chastised by
Terry Eagleton (1985, i) as naively realist. For Eagleton, House erred
by treating Dickenss texts not as text in the post-structuralist sense but
as windows on the Victorian world. Eagleton rejected both such realist
Rereading the London Slums 99

approaches and the other main trend he identified (1985, ii) in Dickens
studies between the 1950s and the 1980s, the formalist habit of treating the
texts as structures of organic meaning.
Eagletons position, which since 1985 has become the orthodox one,
exposes cultural tensions latent in Dickenss writings, but risks losing sight
of earlier scholars more material insights. Classic works of the 1950s and
1960s Kathleen Tillotson (1954) and Philip Collins (1963) should not be
forgotten. Theory-age critics can get sloppy. Writing on London in a recent
book for Cambridge University Press, Anne Humpherys (2011, 22829)
makes errors concerning character names, fictional names and the non-
fictional originals of fictional places in Dombey and Son and Bleak House.
Tambling (2009, 113, 356) includes Agar Town in his chapter on Dombey
and Son and Camden Town, but in a seeming slip omits it from his Index
of London Sites. Tillotson, for her part, deplored error and unclear
thought (Hawes 2008). A brilliant passage in her 1954 book Novels of the
Eighteen-Forties (91115), for instance, concerns the view of time and the
use of period details in Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In
it, Tillotson tracks the details of dress and contemporary reference which
indicate precisely where in the recent past each of these novels is set,
accepting that the author is sometimes more precise and consistent about
temporal setting than at other times. This enables her to compare and
distinguish the writers and texts: does the past, as in Wuthering Heights,
have some positive point or is it merely a means of detemporalising
the action so as to please a Victorian audience longing to be reminded of
the flavour of the age before the railways (Tillotson 1954, 97). It would be
hard to write such a passage without reading a vast quantity of novels from
the 1830s and 1840s, as Tillotson had clearly done. Grasping Victorian
slum fiction calls for an even greater range of reading. Tillotson, after all,
confined herself to less than two decades. The reading of multiple texts
from a period could, like treating places as in Browns sense objects, lead
to a grasp of that periods materiality. It is possible for Tillotson to enter the
mindset of nineteenth-century England in a way that culturalist Dickens
critics since Eagleton in the 1980s cannot. And reading materially involves
returns to the criticism of an earlier age which was unafraid of discussing
the relationship between texts and the world inhabited by their readers and
writers.
100 Finch

In Search of Saffron Hill and Staggss Gardens

A spatialist reader concerned to recover the materiality of the early Victorian


London slums could take a cue from Tillotson and journey not just textually
but also physically into the details of particular literary slums, trying to be
as precise about them as Tillotson is about temporal details, and to do justice
to the complicated relations of real and imaginary place to be found in them.
Two such slums are Saffron Hill in Oliver Twist and Staggss Gardens in
Dombey and Son. They are representations of the two main types of Victorian
slum I mentioned earlier, the rack-rented central district and the self-built
suburb on the periphery.
Saffron Hill can be walked up today. It lies to the west of the City of
London in a neighbourhood where few people have lived since the end of the
Victorian period. You could go there, but you wouldnt find the emporium
of petty larceny in which masses of stolen pocket handkerchiefs hang
dangling from pegs outside the windows or flaunting from the doorposts
which is summoned up by Dickens in Oliver Twist (26.235). To Oliver
himself, fresh from the workhouse and a hundred mile walk to London it
seems the dirtiest and most wretched place he has ever seen (OT, 8.103).
Today, reconnoitring it via Google StreetView, no building on Saffron Hill
appears to have been built before the late nineteenth century, and most seem
to be offices. Of course it is hard to divine even with the aid of Google how
respectable each office is.
Staggss Gardens, on the other hand, figures on no map. For one thing,
self-built working-class districts like it were all destroyed by about 1875,
often by the railway companies. In 1866 the Midland Railway Company
asked for and swiftly got from Parliament permission to seize and destroy
Agar Town, leaving the inhabitants to find other accommodation wherever
they could, Denford (1995, 2) writes, implying that like the dislodged Irish
immigrants of St Giles surveyed by Beames in 1850, their fate would likely
be unpleasant. Denford, vitally, rejects the textual construction of Agar Town
in the mid-Victorian press as a foul slum housing a depraved population.
He seeks to restore to its inhabitants what David Harvey (2008), writing of
cities in developing countries of the twenty-first century, has called The
Right to the City. Visited by Florence and Paul Dombey in Chapter 6 of
Dombey and Son, by Chapter 15 Staggss Gardens has vanished from the
earth and on its site (the arch at the entrance to Euston station, built in
1837, is indicated) granite columns of gigantic girth opened a vista to the
Railway world beyond (Dickens [D&S, 15.21718). Yet Staggss Gardens
keeps a place in the plot of Dombey and Son, since its obliteration results in
Rereading the London Slums 101

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

Conclusion

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

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Making and Taming Messy Space:
The Contested Nature of Historical Space
in Urban China

Philipp Demgenski

In this chapter, I investigate urban development and spatial restructuring


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

Qingdaos old town centres messiness is not simply a state of affairs


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

The Making of Qingdao: A Historical Overview

The city of Qingdao, administratively at the sub-provincial level, is an


economically flourishing seaport, a naval base, and an industrial centre.
Its advantageous location on the Chinese east coast, about 600 kilometres
south of Beijing, has made it a major tourist destination in China that is
not only famous for its eponymous beer brand (Tsingtao Beer) but has also
been rated Chinas most liveable city in 2009 and 2011 and is commonly
referred to as a city with an international, modern, exotic, foreign,
Historical Space in Urban China 109

and worldly flair (Qingdao Government 2010). This favourable image


is closely related to the citys multifaceted and complex colonial past. It
was Germany that, driven by the rivalry with England and by its mission to
become a world (colonial) power, seized the Jiaozhou Bay (where todays
Qingdao is located) in 1898 and founded and built up the city of Qingdao.
The Germans were keen to emulate what the British had achieved in Hong
Kong and establish a so-called model colony (Shekarloo 2010); but for
various reasons, most notably perhaps Japans expansionist activities and
specific interests in the same region, Germanys influence in the area only
lasted for 16 years (18981914); with the beginning of the First World War,
bowing to the increasing pressure of the allied forces (mainly England and
Japan), Germany surrendered and passed Qingdao over to the Japanese.
China, hoping to reclaim the city, allied against the Germans but had not
anticipated the fact that at the end of the First World War, the Versaille
Peace Conference strengthened Japans position in the region. It was not
until 1922 that the Japanese, although reluctantly, agreed to return Qingdao
to the Chinese, only to occupy it once more in 1938. The city was finally
returned to China after Japan was defeated at the end of the Second World
War. The political history of Qingdao since 1898 can broadly be divided
into the following periods:

Year Event
18981914 Founding and development of the city of Qingdao
by German colonisers.
19141922 Further industrialisation of the city under first
Japanese rule
19221937 The development of the city as a so-called
special city under the Beiyang (192228) and
Guomindang (192937) governments
19381945 Second Japanese occupation
19451949 Civil war and the last phase of the Guomindang
government
1949Today CCP rule

Table 51. The Political History of Qingdao since 1898

Owing to this multifaceted colonial history, todays Qingdao is home to


a diverse range of spatial settings and architectural artefacts that embody
a multitude of historical and cultural meanings. When the Germans first
110 Demgenski

designed and built Qingdao, they determined a clear spatial segregation


between the European and the local Chinese areas (Schrecker 1971;
Steinmetz 2007). This racial and spatial segregation also remained the
underlying morphological basis upon which Qingdao developed over the
course of the last century. Japanese rulers but also the Chinese themselves
upheld the citys overall composition and the initially impoverished
Chinese areas that emerged during the early colonial years remained poor
until late into the 1990s. In the mid-1990s, however, the city structure
changed when the city government decided to move out of the old town
centre and establish a brand new centre eastwards along the coastline. This
new and modern centre, characterised by an accumulation of skyscrapers
and clinical-looking open spaces, was further developed after Qingdao
became a partner city to Beijing in the 2008 Olympic Games (W. Wang and
Theodoraki 2007) and has led to a new kind of spatial segregation between
the old town and the newly established modern city centre.
It is against the backdrop of this large-scale spatial restructuring
this ultimate quest for modernitythat the developments in the old town
centre need to be understood. Today, this part of Qingdao features an
eclectic conglomeration of European-style houses, Chinese-style courtyard
dwellings, concrete-blocks reminiscent of the true socialist years and
also twenty-first century-style multi-storey units. Once the most flourishing
and bustling part of town, it is hardly considered a popular destination for
visitors anymore. On one of my trips to Qingdao, in a taxi from the bus
station to my hostel, the driver seemed intrigued by the fact that I wanted
to visit, let alone live in that part of town: there is nothing there, its just
a mess he repeatedly said. Indeed, the atmosphere in this area exudes
a sense of transition, characterised by the hustle and bustle of everyday
economic and private life that takes place in the midst of large-scale urban
construction sites. It is true that some of the European-style architectural
artefacts are considered monuments and symbols of Qingdao (e.g. the
Catholic Church, the newly renovated Train Station, the former Government
Building, etc.) that are relatively well-preserved and regularly frequented
by newly weds who come to take their wedding pictures in front of one of
the several colonial-style mansions or churches. Most of the Chinese-style
buildings, in contrast, are regarded as poor and messy, contributing to
the overall perception of that part of town.
Among them, there is one type of building that is worth examining in
more detail. It is the so-called liyuan that can be regarded as architecturally
unique to Qingdao. These liyuan are Chinese-style courtyard houses that
somewhat resemble Beijings siheyuan () but differ in that they
Historical Space in Urban China 111

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

Speaking of Messy Space: Perceptions of Qingdaos


Old Town Centre

As proposed in the introduction, I view the messiness of the old town


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

else. As such, the migrant workers represent one of the reasons why many
local Qingdaoese who have been living in the old town for a considerably
longer period of time, in some cases for several decades, speak of their
own neighbourhood as being messy. A long-term resident who has been
living in the same liyuan that is known as jiuruli () since 1964,
complained that the migrants do not care much about the specific Qingdao
culture and community spirit of the liyuan and that their behaviour has led
to the decay and messiness of the entire area. This very much reflects
the opinion of many long-term residents, for many of whom there exists
a sense of attachment and community spirit. Many of them showed their
concern about the changes and transformations that have already occurred
to some liyuan; one informant said that the liyuan have their own culture
that should be preserved. Yet, at the same time he acknowledged that
change was also natural and that liyuan have never been static in history
and need to change with time.
Labelling their own surroundings as messy was not, however, only
linked to the presence of migrant workers, it was also related to their
living conditions. Many of the local long-term residents seemed to be very
aware of the fact that they were living at the margins of society, that there
existed newly built middle-class compounds somewhere out there and
that their own living conditions were quite poor in comparison. Thus, not
few people quite vigorously voiced their wish to just tear down the whole
area, these buildings are of no use, they said. Interestingly, a common
opinion was that the government should do something about the area, that
the government was not interested in and neglected this part of town and
that everything was just left in chaos. It is so dirty and messy here was a
common remark.
A similar view was held by yet a different group of people. I call them
hobby historians. These people are mostly local but come from middle
class backgrounds, pursue a variety of unrelated careers and do not actually
live in the old town but mainly in residential compounds somewhere in the
newly developed areas of Qingdao. I refer to them as hobby historians
because they foster a specific interest in the real history of Qingdaos old
town; their main concern is authenticity. They commonly communicate
on the Internet, in chat forums or on Chinese Twitter; they exchange
photos, discuss Qingdaos history and debate about the real origins of
certain buildings. In Harvey (2006) and Lefebvres (1991) sense, they can
be understood as trying to search for the absolute or material spaces
of Qingdaos old town, which, according to them, have been deprived of
their authenticity and are being artificially created or recreated by external
Historical Space in Urban China 113

forces (i.e. the government). An interesting case to illustrate the hobby


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

Taming Messy Space: The Politics of Chinese Urbanism

In Western public discourse the Chinese state is often portrayed as an


omnipotent and powerful single entity that ruthlessly torments its own
citizens. This simplified depiction is, however, problematic. Various studies
on urban China have revealed with considerable skill how the Chinese state
is in fact a complex and multi-layered body within which there exist many
different interest groups and opinions (e.g. Zhang 2001). It is often the case
that the central government entertains quite different interests vis--vis the
provincial, city or district governments. Studies on the notion of scale, to
be understood as politically defined territories (Cartier 2005), illustrate how
after the beginning of the reform period (1978 onwards) and the prudent
but persistent processes of decentralisation, the bureaucratic hierarchies
within the state have become a great deal more complex. In this context, we
also need to take into account urban developers and real estate firms that,
often hand in hand with local-level government agents, take the lead and
run amok in expanding, upgrading, and restructuring already existing urban
space in search of the most suitable scales of activity for maximising capital
accumulation (McGee et al. 2007; J. Wang 2005). The decentralisation and
privatisation processes paired with a still centralised political power have
resulted in a distinct and complex administrative system whose workings
and internal dynamics are highly intricate and even though it would go
beyond the scope of this paper to comprehensively discuss them, it is useful
and necessary to briefly review the spatial transformations that the Chinese
urban sphere has been undergoing over the past decade and the effects they
have had upon the population.
Most of us are well-acquainted with the images of Chinas scintillating
urban modernity that have increasingly been travelling around the globe,
showcasing the countrys exceptional economic development, especially
during mega events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics or the 2010
Shanghai World Expo. The changes that urban China has been subject to
are without doubt exceptional and have become particularly visible in terms
of spatial restructuring. Ma and Wu (2005) have identified the following
newly emerged city spaces in contemporary China: spaces of globalization,
referring to large-scale constructions of spaces that make Chinese cities
appear in a more international light; spaces of elitist consumption,
referring to the establishment of glittering shopping centres, malls, high-
end restaurants, chain stores, expensice hotels and si ib; and spaces of
differentiation and marginalization, which refer to the increasing amount
of gated communities for the emerging middle and upper classes that stand
Historical Space in Urban China 115

in rather stark contrast to migrant workers enclaves. The latter are also
creating spaces of illegality and irregularity (suburbanization) when the so-
called floating population (liudongrenkou ) engages in illegal
construction work.
These newly emerging urban spaces have replaced the previously
highly regulated, secularised and politicised urban spaces of the danwei
(work-unit) community (Bray 2005), in which the authoritarian state
naturally appropriated public and also private space so that individuals, as
Davis (1995, 3) puts it, enjoy[ed] only a modicum of social autonomy.
One driving force behind this spatial restructuring has been economic
development; another one has been the countrys quest for a kind of world
city modernity, one that is perhaps less determined by economic and
financial factors as put forward by Friedmann (1986) and Sassen (2001),
but more by cultural factors. As cities aspire to modernise, they try to
generate the ingredients that cater to a particular form of life, a particular
world city culture (Hannerz 1996). It is clear that in the Chinese case, the
hardware (i.e. financial institutions and service industries) is not developed
enough to be on the same level with cities like Tokyo, London, New York
or even Hong Kong, but this does not prevent them from developing the
necessary software (i.e., the cultural and maybe also spatial attributes of
a world city) that makes them appear in a more modern light and that
produce these spaces of modernity (Lu 2006).
This relates to what I suggested at the outset, namely that messy space
exists as a discourse that stands in direct opposition to the just-outlined
quest for modernity. Hence, one of the outcomes of this fast-paced spatial
restructuring has been the destruction and negligence of many vernacular
places that have emerged and evolved over a longer period of time but that
are now regarded as messy and backwards. We can, in this context, speak
of taming space, a term that, as Massey (2005, 65) puts it, refers to a
particular form of ordering and organising space which refused (refuses)
to acknowledge its multiplicities, its fractures and its dynamisms. Indeed,
urbanisation in todays China has to a large extent been about reducing
urban space to a one-dimensional spatial plane of what I call urban
sterility or what Aug (1995, 7778) famously called non-places. Much
that appears to be messy is being tamed and replaced by something
sterile and regulated.
This is particularly apparent in terms of so-called historical space in
contemporary urban China (Liang 2000; Pan 2005; Pan 2011; Marinelli
2010). The development of the old town centre of Qingdao and the fate of
the liyuan reflect this. Liyuan are interesting for the fact that they have long
116 Demgenski

been considered as a symbol of poverty and deficiency and as Zhan Erpengs


(2002) findings show, many of them were ruthlessly knocked down as part
of extensive restoration schemes initiated by the government in the 1980s
and 1990s; out of the over 500 liyuan built between 1898 and 1940, it is
estimated that only about 50 or so remain today (Afei 2006). This trend
has, however, changed over the past two or three years. Since 2008, as an
influx in articles on the Internet, in newspapers as well as Chinese academic
journals indicates, the local government has increasingly acknowledged
and recognised, as the Qingdao Financial Daily puts it, the cultural
value (Hassa 2008) of the liyuan and has refrained from subjecting these
old constructions to any further development or transformation. On the
contrary, liyuan are increasingly being propagated as distinct artefacts of
Qingdao culture, in some cases leading to their monumentalisation. One
such example would be Pichaiyuan (), which is a collection of
liyuan that have been nicely decorated, whose messiness has been quite
literally tamed. A recently opened liyuan museum further illustrates this
trend. It becomes obvious that these shack-dwellings are undergoing a
transformation in terms of their spatial meaning: from a useless, redundant
and messy construction for the poor and unprivileged, they are in the
process of transforming into an architectural artefact that connotes cultural
value. The same is true for the old colonial town in general. While in the
1980s, the government still regarded the old centre as an architectural
disease and not modern enough (Zhan 2002), today, it heavily
capitalises on this image, selling the exoticism of the city (see, for example,
romantic travel in Qingdao, Anon. 2009). In fact, plans to transform
the entire old town centre into a kind of cultural recreational area have
existed for quite some time (Liu 2006).
These modernity discourses naturally also influence residents and other
socio-economic groups opinions and perceptions of the old town centre.
While the hobby historians may be dissatisfied about the processes of
monumentalisation that, according to them, ignore the true meaning
of history, residentslong-term residents in particularare constantly
reminded that they are living in a place that is essentially antonymous
to modernity. This dilemma generated a set of questions that all groups
of urban society struggled to find an answer to: what should be done to
historical buildings? Should the liyuan just be torn down and then perhaps
rebuilt? Should they be refurbished and then turned into a kind of tourist
attraction or should they just be left to nature to inflict its changes upon
them? I argue that these questions ignore two crucial constituent facts of
space, namely people and their spatial practices. As outlined above, space
Historical Space in Urban China 117

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

Making Messy Space: Moving and Being in the City

During one of my fieldwork trips to Qingdao, I had the opportunity to


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

for, namely the preservation of real historical urban space, is, in fact,
also a kind of, albeit different, taming of space; it is the attempt to fix
space in terms of its historical meaning. The hobby historians perceive
the historical space as absolute (authentic) place that is being erased
by destructive external forces. However, the creation of a historically
meaningful artefact is in itself very much a process that takes place in the
present; in line with this, Ashworth (2011, 11) illustrates that the meaning
of historical space is always catering to the specific needs in the present,
new presents will constantly imagine new pasts to satisfy changing
needs, which has led some to argue that the past is merely imagined and
that there is no such thing as heritage (Smith 2006, 13). While I agree
with the idea that historical space is a product of specific narratives in the
present (see also Appadurai 1981; Walsh 1992; Ashworth and Tunbridge
2000), we must be cautious not to deny the existence of a physical/absolute
dimension of historical space entirely; Masseys (2005, 117118) account
of a journey from London to Milton Keynes on which one passes the
remains of a Norman Castle underlines this; according to her, this journey
reminds us that the presentness of horizontal space is in fact a product
of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would
but see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force. Indeed, all
new meanings that are assigned to an artefact will always to some degree
be constrained by the already existing ones, which in turn makes complete
fabrication tremendously difficult, if not impossible to achieve. In other
words, while there is no absolute historical spatial truth, historical space is
still real.
Finally, it is necessary to once more consider the various state agents
that, as illustrated earlier, are trying to tame messy space in order to
create a clean environment and convey an image of modernity. How do
actions by the government and its agents affect the local population?
Even though it is true that local residents own behaviour, as just outlined,
creates the messiness of the old town that they themselves but also
other groups of urban society complain about, but local residents are by
no means inherently messy. Instead, as I argued at the beginning, it is
evidently government policies that have created the conditions for peoples
behaviour. The transferral of land-use rights to local government agents
that have created immense prosperity but also severe destitution and led
to increasing social stratification in contemporary Chinas urban society
(also in spatial terms) as well as the formation of a modernity discourse,
which has determined Chinas path towards urbanisation that was to a large
extent made possible through millions of migrant workers flooding into
Historical Space in Urban China 119

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

Conclusion

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

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III

National Spaces
Cabins and National Identity
in Norwegian Literature

Ellen Rees

There is probably no category of building today that is more directly


associated with Norwegian identity than the hytte or cabin. Roughly half
the population has direct access to a secondary vacation dwelling, either in
the mountains, by the sea, or in the woods (Vitters 2007, 266). Yet these
quintessentially and iconically Norwegian dwellings have a surprisingly
short history, and the way that cabins signified in the nineteenth century
was significantly different than the ways they signify today. In this analysis
I will examine three prose texts from the beginning, middle, and end of
a period of roughly two hundred years in Norwegian literary history in
order to illustrate how the cabin has functioned as a space for working out
questions of national identity. These texts are Maurits C. Hansens short
story Luren (The Lur)1 from 1819, Knut Hamsuns novel Markens
Grde (Growth of the Soil) from 1917, and Per Pettersons 2003 novel, Ut
og stjle hester (Out Stealing Horses).
What I will present in the following is a very small part of a much larger
project that examines how cabins and other temporary seasonal dwellings
signify in Norwegian identity construction. I focus primarily on literary
representations because literature is a discursive practice that allows
for extensive reflection upon the phenomenological experience of place,
and upon the symbolic and allegorical meaning with which place can be
imbued.2 The central hypothesis for this study is that the cabin in Norway
serves as what Michel Foucault called the heterotopia, a particular type
of social space that functions on numerous registers simultaneously, and

1
Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. A lur is a wind instrument
used widely in traditional Norwegian folk music. Luren first appeared in the
newspaper Morgenbladet, and was later published along with six other stories
under the subheading Skizzerede nationale Fortllinger (Sketched national tales)
in the 1825 edition of his Digtninger (Works).
2
Here I follow Yurij M. Lotmans suggestions that texts can reflect an entire cultural
programme (Lotman et al. 1975, 20).
126 Rees

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

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

Historical Overview

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

3
Norway was the lesser party in a union under the Danish monarch from 1380 to
1814, and under the Swedish monarch from 1814 to 1905. Before 1380 Norway had
been an independent kingdom.
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 127

of Oslo, it has always been very sparsely populated. Centuries of Danish


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

4
Et Lycksaligt Liv Eftertnckt Da Indbilding og Forfarenhed Derom Disputerede.
5
En Bonde-Hyte / som et Konge-Slot skal blive.
128 Rees

occupied it, was held up by Enlightenment thinkers like Juel an ideal of


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

6
During the period 19352013 the prime minister of Norway has come from the
Labour party for all but sixteen years.
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 129

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

Hansens The Lur

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

Lur is not merely new and picturesque, as Johansen suggests, but instead
functions as part of an overtly nationalist project in which the author hoped
to unite the various social classes in a common nation building project.
Bjrn Tysdahl has argued that, despite the many scholars who suggest
the opposite, Hansen was in fact an author deeply concerned with class
identity (Tysdal 1988, 120). The analysis I offer here can be understood as
a continuation of this line of reasoning. And, like Jan Sjvik, I view The
Lur as a very carefully constructed rhetorical exercise, although I will
argue that Hansens rhetorical strategies serve an explicitly nationalistic
purpose that supersedes the interpersonal positioning that Sjvik points
out. Whereas Sjvik interprets the sexual economy within the text
metafictionally as an expression of the authors rhetorical positioning
(Sjvik 1994, 522), I read the interpersonal relationships allegorically as an
expression of the authors utopian vision. In this I follow in the footsteps
of Doris Sommers groundbreaking work on national romances; Sommer
argues that in the nineteenth century European foundational fictions
sought to overcome political and historical fragmentation through love
(Sommer 1990, 84). This is clearly the case in The Lur as well, where
each major character signifies a distinct social class.
In The Lur, Ragnhild, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, represents
the independent land-owning farmer class that distinguishes early modern
Norwegian society from most of the rest of Europe. These independent
farmers play a key symbolic role in the conceptualization of Norwegian
national identity. Ragnhilds lover Guttorm, on the other hand, is a man of
the landless tenant farmer class. In The Lur, a third and equally important
group, the urban civil servant class, which is here represented by the
narrator Carl Mlmann, provides necessary mediation between these two
groups. Because Norway had no aristocracy and no political sovereignty,
the civil servant class functioned as the de facto ruling class and arbiters of
taste. Yet this elite group remained perpetual outsiders, since traditionally
they were either Danes or Norwegians educated in Denmark. Thus, in a
sense, Mlmann has as much of a stake in the identity politics that take
place in Hansens text as the two lovers do, because he needs to establish
a legitimate role in the new nation for the foreign class to which he
belongs.
In Hansens vision of Norway, all three groups arewith Mlmanns
interventionunited by the common goal of creating a new, modern
society free from the yoke of Danish and Swedish cultural and political
domination. In The Lur the specific space of the cabin itself functions as
the meeting place where these social negotiations are worked out. Note that
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 131

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

Figure 61. Johannes Flintoe, Krundalen (1822).

The narrator Carl Mlmanns journey through Norway functions on two


registers; on the level of plot his professional duties necessitate an extended
journey, while thematically speaking that journey awakens his national
pride and acquaints him with his homeland. Hansen builds on the literary
tradition established by The Norwegian Society in Cophenhagen, in which
132 Rees

an emerging sense of national identity was expressed through epideictic


verses praising the Norwegian landscape.7 His unique contributiona
contribution that takes on a life of its own during the ensuing nation-
building processis the insertion of the cabin as a symbolic national home
within the wilderness represented by the uninhabited cliffs, fjords and
mountains that up until Hansen had dominated literary representations of
Norway.
The narrator is clearly a tourist in his native land, and in the opening
lines of The Lur he compares Norway to Switzerland, which became
a major tourist destination toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Mlmanns comparison is favorable: But why are we always admiring
those Helvetican Prospects? Why not decorate our walls with views of
the fatherland! This parish seems to me to be the equal of even the most
beautiful Swiss landscape (Hansen 1825, 83).8 Switzerland remained
for much of the nineteenth century the primary model and competitor
for Norways attempt to commodify itself as a tourist destination. In
the early twentieth century, novelist Knut Hamsun wrote critically of
Norways efforts to sell itself as the new Switzerland. But whereas the
mountain tourism of Switzerland was based on access to inns and hostels
whose locations were determined by the settlement patterns developed in
valley villages and mountain passes, in Norway isolated cabins played a
much more dominant role. This is because the Norwegian population is
concentated mostly along the coastline, with a long tradition of seasonal
access to the interior that relied on temporary dwellings as bases for
herding and foraging.
Mlmann sees the potential of Norway as a tourist commodity, and the
beauty of the landscape awakens a specifically national sense of pride in
him. The valley in question appears almost as a vision in Mlmanns travel
narrative: After a rather difficult journey by foot I stood at sunset on a
hill, from which with surprising tenderness the valley suddenly opened
its arms to my gaze (Hansen 1825, 84).9 Sjvik interprets this passage
metafictionally as an expression of Hansens narrative desire (Sjvik
1994, 531), but it functions equally convincingly as a patriotic discourse

7
For a discussion of the use of landscape imagery in the budding nationalism of the
writers of The Norwegian Society, see Bliksrud 1999.
8
Hvorfor skulle vi dog evig beundre hine Helvetiens Prospecter? Hvorfor aldrig
pryde vre Vgge med fdrelandske Udsigter! Denne Egn forekommer mig at staa
ved Siden av det skjnneste Schweizerlandskab.
9
Efter en temmelig besvrlig Fodreise stod jeg ved Solens Nedgang paa Hiden,
hvorfra med overraskende Ynde Dalen pludselig aabnede sin Favn for mit Blik.
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 133

designed to elicit pride and curiosity about the nation in relation to other
more hegemonic locations, such as the urban centres of Copenhagen
and Stockholm, or even the larger towns of Norway such as Bergen and
Christiania (today Oslo).
The description of Ragnhilds family of origin is a veritable
encyclopedia of national symbolism: her father, appropriately named Thor
(a reference to Old Norse origins) greets Mlmann as his countryman, he
wears a national costume, he speaks a distinct local dialect, and his home
is distinguished by tidy simplicity and decent prosperity (Hansen 1825,
8485). Thor combines the modern and the ancient: according to Mlmann
he looks like one of the antique wood prints of our Norwegian kings,
he has a copy of Snorri Sturlasons sagas and claims kinship with Harald
Fairhair, but he also asks questions about current events in parliament
(Hansen 1825, 8586). Ragnhild is the female inheritor of this proud
tradition, and thus there is, traditionally speaking, literally no place in this
social context for her love of Guttorm, a man of lower social status.
If Ragnhilds family represents Norways imagined glorious past,
Guttorm represents its utopian future. Guttorm is a handsome young man
with an unusually well-bred demeanour according to Mlmann (Hansen
1825, 88),10 and he is a complex figure. He pursues an education in order
to better himself and win the hand of Ragnhild, but when denied by Thor
he reverts to the role of hired hand. Guttorms failed education is an odd
detail that hints at social mobility and egalitarianism, but Hansen falls
short of conceptualizing a new society completely free of traditional class
distinctions.
Mlmann sees Thors tradition-bound family pride as misguided and
harmful, and takes it upon himself to bring the couple and their illegitimate
daughter back into the family fold. This process gets underway upon
Mlmanns discovery of the secret cabin on his return journey through the
valley. Once he discovers its existence and the love story that it conceals,
Mlmann places himself in the position of mediator. That the couple had
managed to hide both Ragnhilds pregnancy and the first six months of
the childs life by concealing her in the cabin is an example of the kind
of improbable plot element that typically detracts from Hansens literary
reputation. I would argue, however, that such details do not matter in what
is clearly a national allegory rather than a realist narrative. The point is
that two disparate groups that traditionally have viewed each other with
suspicion are here united in a national romance that is symbolically

10
en vakker, ung Mand af et usdvanlig dannet Vsen.
134 Rees

officiated by a third group.


The cabin itself takes up a relatively small space in the narrative.
Mlmann first sees it in an evocatively romantic scene: Just then the moon
appeared, and I caught a glimpse in a rocky crevice of a small cabin and
outside of it a person (Hansen 1825, 89).11 The structure itself is very
simple and rather impermanent; Mlmann describes it as small and made
of woven fir branches (Hansen 1825, 89).12 Its only interior feature is the
little bed in which the couples baby daughter lies. The provisional nature of
the dwelling, built as it is only of branches, necessitates a change, since the
little family cannot continue to stay there once winter comes. Hansen uses
the term barhytte (branch hut) rather than hytte to distinguish it from the
far more permanent buildings associated with mountain dairy production
and other agrarian work practices. Its temporary status echoes the civil
status of Ragnhild and Guttorm who, although they have the sympathy of
both Mlmann and (presumably) the reader, remain outside established
social norms because they are not married. Their family needs the sanction
of marriage just as they need a more permanent sanctuary to shelter them.
Nonetheless, the existence of even so impermanent a structure as the cabin
built by Guttorm creates an actual place in which the three social classes
are united together for the first time as constituents of a new imagined
community.
Mlmann uses his cultural capital and access to the European intellectual
tradition to warm Thor to the idea of a union between his daughter and
a poor worker. Through a series of literary references, Mlmann builds a
case against Thors family pride and in favour of a new union:
As if by chance I directed the conversation toward the cruelty of parents
and told Thor and his wife about Philip of Spain, and of dAguesseau and
others. I concluded by telling about Eginhard and Emma. Once their interest
was awakened, I went closerand made up a story of my own, which in
nearly every detail resembled Ragnhilds. Thor became clearly attentive. I
then took Snorri and the Bible down from the shelf, laid them on the table
and said: There, Thor, is the book that teaches about your royal lineage;
but here lies the word of the Lord, which teaches that we are all the same
before God. (Hansen 1825, 9091)13

11
Netop gik Maanen op, og jeg skimtede i Bjergklften en liden hytte og udenfor
den et Menneske.
12
[L]iden og sammenflettet af Granbar.
13
Som af en Hndelse frte jeg Samtalen paa Forldres Haardhedog fortalte
Thor og hans Kone om Philip af Spanien, og dAgasseau [sic] og Flere. Jeg sluttede
med at fortlle om Eginhard og Emma. Da deres Deeltagelse var vkket, gik
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 135

Note that in a metafictive move Hansen has Mlmann insert his


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

Hamsuns Growth of the Soil

Nearly a century after Hansen, Knut Hamsun activated the cabin motif
in his anti-modern, atavistic fantasy of a return to the primitive, Growth
of the Soil. Although the relationship between Isak and Inger Sellanraa
that Hamsun depicts in the novel is instinctual and primitive rather than
sentimental or romantic, it is still possible to read the novel as perhaps
the last major national romance in the Norwegian canon. In writing in
opposition to the enormous social changes taking place in Norway around
the turn of the century, Hamsuns overt aim in Growth of the Soil is to

jeg nrmereog sammensatte selv en Historie, som nsten i Eet og Alt lignede
Ragnhilds. Thor blev hiligen opmrksom. Da tog jeg Snorro og Bibelen ned af
Hylden, lagde dem paa Bordet og sagde: Der, Thor, er Bogen, som lrer om din
Kongeslgt; men her ligger Herrens Ord, som lrer, at vi ere Alle lige for Gud.
136 Rees

revitalize Norway by bringing the nation back to its primitive, agrarian


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

14
Om hsten fikk han en bolig opp, en gamme av torv, den var tett og varm, det
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 137

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

knaket ikkei den i storm, den kunne ikke brenne opp. Han kunne g inn i dette
hjem og lukke dren og vre der, han kunne st utenfor p drhellen og eie hele
bygningen hvis noen kom forbi. Gammen var delt i to, i den ene ende bodde han
selv, i den annen dyrene (Hamsun 2011, 9).
138 Rees

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

The Post-National Cabin

Toward the turn of the millennium, Norway like the rest of the world
entered a period of dramatic social change that has been termed late
modernity. This is a period marked by a number of factors, including
increasing globalization and individualism, as well as a questioning of the
role of the nation that has given rise to the term postnationalism. Given
Norways fraught history of foreign domination, it is not surprising that the
country has struggled with how to position itself in relation to globalization,
particularly as this is manifested in an increasingly diverse population.
The idea of the cabin as a locus for a specifically national romance has
been called into question, and instead we increasingly see writers instead
activating the cabin as a retreat from (national) family trauma.
One of the most popular and illustrative examples of this shift from the
allegorical national romance to what might be called the national divorce
can be found in Per Pettersons 2003 novel Ut og stjle hester (Out
Stealing Horses). Out Stealing Horses is a profoundly melancholic and
nostalgic exploration of loss. Petterson constructs multiple layers of time
in the novel, with the main character, Trond Sander, reflecting back from
the narrative present of 1999 on both the loss of his wife and sister three
years earlier and on the summer of 1948, when his father abandoned his
family. In the 1999 narrative, Trond is perhaps unconsciously mimicking
his father; he buys a cabin in an isolated rural community near the Swedish
border to fix up and live in, much as his father in the 1940s acquired a cabin
near the border to fix up as a cover for his trafficking for the resistance in
occupied Norway. The cabin in the 1948 narrative in Out Stealing Horses
performs and activates a number of functions and emotional registers
simultaneously. It is an heroic place becuase of its association with the
resistance movement; it is an erotic locus because of its previous history
as a seter dwelling, and because of the romance that develops between
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 139

Tronds father and a local woman; it is a masculine idyll because of the


outdoor adventure and manual labor that takes place there; and, finally, it
activates the Enlightenment ideal of moderation in that it is marked in the
text as a peasant home through the presence of a local overlord of sorts
Barkald, the wealthy landowner whom Trond vaguely hates without really
even knowing why.
If read allegorically, both Tronds cabin and his fathers cabin function
as an escape from the national family into an ambiguous private world.
Although he initially purchases the cabin for its unique location within
walking distance of the Swedish border, other characters in the novel
recognize that Tronds father simply enjoyed being there: He had not
intended his stays to be long. . . . But every time he had been to Sweden
. . . and came back across the border under cover of night, he found several
more things he could put in order or improve on before he went back to
Oslo (Petterson 2007, 139140).15 Tronds father betrays his family
through an adulterous affair with a married woman at the same time that
he works to preserve the symbolic national family through his resistance
to the Nazi occupation of his country. Moreover, Tronds feeling of intense
closeness with his father during the summer of 1948 is betrayed at the
end by his fathers inexplicable disappearancehe sends Trond home at
the end of the summer, but never returns himself. Similarly Trond buys
his cabin near the border without informing his adult daughter, who has
to resort to detective work to track him down (Petterson 2007, 207; 198 in
Norwegian version).
Other contemporary Norwegian novels, such as Merethe Lindstrms
Steinsamlere (Rock collectors, 1996) and Britt Karin Larsens Munnen i
gresset (The mouth in the grass, 1996) also represent the cabin as a retreat
from (national) family trauma, rather than as a refuge for (national)
romance. In all of these works, the desire to be aloneto be unfettered
by family and romantic bondsdrives the characters to visit an isolated
cabin where they can gain perspective on their interpersonal relationships
and rebuild their lives after trauma and loss. These novels reflect the
ubiquitousness of cabins in contemporary Norway, where nearly everyone
has the time and resources necessary to step outside of everyday life in this
way. Pettersons Trond Sander is newly retired and makes it clear that he
has more than enough money; Larsens Elisabeth rents a summer house
15
Det var ikke meninga han skulle vre der s lenge av gangen . . . . Men hver
gang han hadde vrt i Sverige og kom tilbake over grensa i ly av natta . . . fant han
ut at det var flere enn n ting han mtte f orden p eller utbedre fr han dro inn til
Oslo igjen (Petterson 2003, 135).
140 Rees

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

Conclusion

The cabin was a phenomenally productive trope in Norways nineteenth-


century nation-building process because it made it possible to imagine a
unique Norwegian culture despite two seemingly overwhelming conceptual
difficulties. On the one hand there was the impossibility of having an
entirely wild national culture associated exclusively with nature. On the
other hand, there was the almost total lack of established cultural institutions
in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which made Norway appear
uncivilized and even barbaric in comparison with other European nations.
The cabin represents a distinct position that is neither untamed wilderness
nor urban civilization, and that can be used productively in the construction
of an independent national identity. Nevertheless, it took about a hundred
years, and the establishment of tourism as an industry, before the cabin
truly became a quintessentially Norwegian heterotopia. The cabin as a
conceptual space first had to shake its longstanding associations with
poverty. With the Norwegian Tourist Associations creation of a network
of leisure cabins intended to give the urban elite access to the wilderness,
a new type of social space that connected nature and civilization arose.
Once identified and delineated, the cabin meme went, as they say, viral, and
within only a few decades it has become the single most important locus
for precisely the kind of heterotopian cultural contestations that Foucault
describes. In contemporary literature, the cabin has become a personal
retreat from which one is able both to gain critical distance on the national
project, and turn inward to heal ones own emotional wounds.
National Identity in Norwegian Literature 141

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Pax Forlag.
Constructions of Space:
The Literary Configuration
of The English Countryside

Angela Locatelli

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Semiotic


and Symbolic Construction of Space

Urbanisation is a global phenomenon, and mobility has become its central


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

question of how the country has been, and still is empirically perceived,
theoretically conceptualized and experientially lived1 (Soja 2000, xiv)
remains a tale worth telling, like most tales beginning with once upon
a time. My contribution will therefore address this issue, with special
reference to Great Britain where social history has had a strong voice
in shaping the concept of country. Social history in this context was
concerned with the dramatically transformative vicissitudes of an old and
primarily agricultural economy changing into a postmodern economy via
the various phases of a mercantile economy; it is also concerned with the
rise of colonial imperialism, as well as industrial and post-industrial finance.
In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams has convincingly
dealt with the social and historical implications involved in the definitions
and understanding of the country and the city up to the first decades of
the twentieth century. In line with some earlier studies my discussion of
the notion of country will be interdisciplinary. In his aforementioned
study (1973), Williams sees English history as a crucial chapter in the
history of Western capitalism, and he explains the vicissitudes and roles
of the country in terms of this macro-narrative. My understanding of the
definition of rural spaces makes use of Williamss observations, but I take
a more interdisciplinary approach by combining social history, semiotics
and cultural theory. In fact, I will consider other influential contributions
that include the seminal works of Henri Lefebvre (1974, 2006) on the
production of space and Guy Debords unconventional, avant-garde
definition of psychogeography (1954). Williams, Lefebvre and Debord
are often mentioned in various disciplines or quoted as starting points
on the subject of urban development and rural/urban relationships. Their
views have inspired several studies, most of which seem to share a belief
in the undeniable interdependence of social, economic and cultural forces.
The interdisciplinary trend was further developed in the strong culturalist
perspective of James G. Turner and what he aptly called The Politics of
Landscape (1979). More recent studies, such as that by Gerald MacLean,
Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward, The Country and the City Revisited:
England and the Politics of Culture, 15501850 (1999), and the already
mentioned works of Marc Aug and Edward W. Soja have brought further
innovations to classical social history and new insights to the culturalist
arena.
My approach is shaped largely by the findings of literature and
aesthetics, but it also connects to the above premises in social and cultural

1
I am borrowing Edward W. Sojas terminology. See Soja 2000 and Soja 1989.
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 145

theory. I will argue that the concept of country is strongly indebted to


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

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

Literary Constructions of the Country as Country


and the Complex Configuration of Space in Literature

My exploration of the English rural myth is based, as I have said, on the


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

2
A similar view is proposed for the visual arts in Barrell 1995.
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 147

up to the second half of the twentieth century, is responsible for the creation
and ideological reinforcement of the perfect correspondence of the country
with The Country. One of the earliest and most frequent strategies with
which this cultural equivalence was built is the classical tradition of both
pastoral and georgic poetry, which celebrated nature respectively as a
Locus Amoenus (in contrast to urban strife) and as modified and improved
by literally fruitful rural activities. In English literature this encomiastic
tradition extends from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and shows
an amazing adaptability to Augustan, Romantic, Victorian modernist
and postmodern aesthetic codes. The tradition extends from Spensers
Shepheards Calendar (1579) and Shakespeares As You Like It to Vita
Sackville Wests The Land (1926), from Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia (1581)
to A. E. Housmans poems (1939), from Andrew Marvell (162178)
(famously, in his bucolic poem The Garden) to Alexander Pope (1688
1744), from William Collins (172159) and Thomas Gray (Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard, 1742) to Thomas Hardy (18401928), from
D.H. Lawrence (18851930) and the War Poets (of World War I) to Tom
Stoppards Arcadia (1993), with its typical postmodern ironic twist on the
theme and on tradition. But the pastoral is by no means the dominant genre
extolling the virtues of the country in English literature, and this is why the
texts I have chosen (passages from Mary Russell Mitford, Robert Francis
Kilvert, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Thomas
Carlyle, Sir Herbert Read and Thomas Babington Macaulay) should be
discussed in detail, as examples of a highly influential literary pattern.
I open my investigation with Mary Russell Mitfords Our Village
(1824), not only for its chronological priority, but also because it is a
uniquely comprehensive and influential representation of village life.
Mitfords multifaceted attention to character, relationships and landscape
vividly depicts from the inside the experience of living in the country as
a felicitous condition:
Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me the most
delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not
of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses,
messuages or tenements, as a friend of mine calls such ignoble and
nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us
as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and
insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns
in a convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to
every one, interested in every one, and authorized to hope that every one
feels an interest in us (Mitford [1824] 1936, 3).
148 Locatelli

Metaphors are crucial here, not just as quintessentially ornamental literary


devices, but also for their potential to pack in information much more
economically (and suggestively) than merely diagnostic, scientific
descriptions. The village is metaphorically an anthill, a beehive, a
sheepfold, a convent, a ship, thus suggesting the close physical proximity
of its dwellers, as well as a regulated form of living that provides intrinsic
social harmony. The sentence on social relationswe know every one,
are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorized to hope
that every one feels an interest in usseems almost directly taken from
Shaftsburys irenic philosophy.
By contrast, Elizabeth Gaskells ladies in Cranford know all each
others proceedings, but they are exceedingly indifferent to each others
opinions. Mitfords rural characters essentially differ from Gaskells in
being generally sympathetic to each other.
More importantly for my argument on the literary configuration of
space, Mary Russell Mitfords celebration of the rural village and rural
living is accompanied by a remarkable meta-literary dimension. She
seems to be consciously acknowledging the strong ties between the great
tradition of the English novel and village life and seems to corroborate
the notion that literature is a major factor in the meaningful configuration
of space: Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics
when they talk of the unities (Mitford [1824] 1936, 3). The secluded
rural space is thus immensely dignified by its metaphorical association
with the classical Aristotelian unities. Nothing of the sort happens in most
nineteenth-century novels, where a confined locality usually spells
claustrophobia. Cranford again comes to mind as the epitome of such
perception. The contrast between Mitford and Gaskells novels is evident
and furthered in other narrative elements, which make their descriptions
and diverging evaluations curiously complementary.
Mitfords literary psychogeography is mostly grounded in her
appreciation for locality and rootedness:
Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-
wheels of a hero, to get to sleep at Vienna and awaken in Madrid; it
produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing
is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austens
delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with
every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White over
his own parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and
coppices, as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels who inhabit them; or
to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him, and his
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 149

goats, and his man Friday how much we dread any new-comers, any fresh
importation of savage or sailor. . . . or to be shipwrecked with Ferdinand on
that other, lovelier island. (Mitford [1824] 1936, 34)

Mitfords tender, sympathetic, yet sometimes unsparingly ironic attitude to


this world can be associated with the well-known harsher comments on
the pettiness of rural life in Cranford (1853). Elizabeth Gaskells humorous
treatment of the Cheshire village ultimately defines it metaphorically as a
cage, where wit is the only antidote to the daily routine. Gaskell highlights
the gender divide between her characters, seeing it as a decisive force in
rural life. The paradigm of the social irrelevance of the Amazons who
own the houses and spend their energies in organising futile evening parties
and paying reverential attention to fashion is set against the gentlemens
important business of commerce, war, social progress and mobility. The
mens disappearance into the country is subtly counterbalanced by their
significant role in the Country and its destiny, symbolically represented
by the railway and ships:
If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman
disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man
in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his
regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great
neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a
railroad. (Gaskell [1853] 1972, 34)

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

spurs, peonies, stocks, and carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a
sentry-box, where one lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the
gayest of all gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in
what an exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. (Mitford [1824]
1936, 67)

The last sentence, probably written with irony, on the nascent ideology of
happy pauperism conveys Mitfords keen awareness of social conditions.
So does the allusion to the landlord as well as the references in another
passage to revolutionary ideas circulating from the city to the putatively
isolated country. Given Mitfords special view of the individual elements
of this particular place, and the corresponding usual effectiveness of her
ekphrasis, one cannot help but picture the narrator as she traverses this
space, a feeling corroborated by her explicit invitation to the reader to join
in the exploration: Will you walk with me through our village, courteous
reader? The homodiegetic focalisation of this narrative means that this
space is seen from the inside, and idiosyncratically through her gaze,
but the passage also suggests that the narrators friendly invitation to the
reader seems to grow out of the peaceful, cordial and well-meaning habits
of country folks.
The aporetic image of village life that ensues from reading Gaskell and
Mitford side by side spells out village life as a stifling comfort. Both
Gaskell and Mitfords descriptions and carefully nuanced observations,
their highly individualised portraits and their language are a tribute to the
unique sense of comfort and discomfort for which the English countryside
is famous worldwide. Such aporia in framing the same space (and time)
is the product of a quintessentially literary configuration that allows for
complexity and even contradiction in the perception and creation of space
and character, where non-fiction provided a one-sided, diagnostic image, a
reified and ideologically inflected document.
It is hard to find mainstream descriptions of the English countryside
that dispense with Mitfords propositions. Her evaluative description
has in fact become a commonplace, including her benevolent, but never
complacent perspective on rural village life. Her literary skills and original
view of (and ear for) the people, the scenery and the language around her
save her prose from the banality of most later accounts and ideologically
tendentious descriptions of country life, not least because her enthusiasm
for the village is candid and good-humoured.
Another and even more inspired praise of the country comes from
Robert Francis Kilvert (184079). The vicar of Bredwardine is remembered
for his Diaries (a hybrid literary genre between fiction and non-fiction),
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 151

which provide a description of the beautiful region of the Welsh border


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

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

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

Here the landscape obeys the aesthetic rules of the Picturesque, rather than
those of the Romantic Sublime: in fact, the lakes are miniature lakes,
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 153

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

In this passage the cottages belong to a small, quiet, fertile domain.


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

I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heap of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
Wars annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

The relationship between the two space-time entities (i.e. the battlefield
and the field, the timeless rural rhythms and wars annals) is one of both
opposition and complementarity, in the sense that, while seasonal rhythms
supposedly remain untouched and unspoiled by political events, the life of
the Country is expanding somewhere else, yet one can rely on the natural,
internal stability of the countryside to project itself towards the external
and mutable world, the whole world indeed, in the colonial and imperialist
enterprise. Alan Shelston has discussed the theme of The Significance of
the Insignificant in relation both to this poem and to Thomas Hardys The
Return of the Native (Shelston 1995, 95121.) His comments on Hardy
seem to corroborate my view of a pervasive Victorian strategy of valorising
the marginal (i.e. rural life), while proclaiming its intrinsic insignificance
on the political stage.
Another facet of the complex relationship between the province and
the centre of national life is explored in Hardys densely metaphorical
description of Casterbridge in The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the
interdependence of a provincial town and the surrounding countryside is
expressed in richly nuanced terms of spatial proximity:
Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around; not its urban
opposite. Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who
desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew
straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they
were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown
floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains;
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 155

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

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

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

Childhood memories, and their timeless sense of wonder, give an aura of


authenticity to an otherwise rather rhetorical sketch of familiar shrines: i.e.
the saddle room and the blacksmith shop. The magic is conveyed through
a metaphorical phantasmagoria that metamorphoses these rural spots into a
treasure (notice the blacksmiths ruby and golden sparks).The symbolic
and ideological implications of realistic details are almost obvious:
cleanliness (pungent clean smell of saddle-soap, the white-washed
room), manual labour (the joy of making things), productivity and
order are among the homely values that a boy naturally absorbs through
a country-village upbringing. Less obviously, but no less compellingly,
the village symbolically corresponds to infancy and to what is lost in the
writers adult and urban life. Lingering memories of a magical past may
also signify a nostalgic celebration of what is perceived as an inevitably
dissolving rural world, which is destined to disintegrate under the advance
of technological innovation.
Just a few years after 1933, technology and the growing industrialisation
of agricultural areas turned saddle rooms and blacksmiths shops into
quaint, poetic relics of the past. The Innocent Eye can be interpreted as
the writers last cry against the very real threat of a no longer innocent
post-war world. Similar gestures abound in English literature, whenever
domestic identity is undergoing a dramatic re-definition. The fundamental
ambivalence of celebrating what is lost seems to be a recurring cultural
pattern in Western civilisation.
The country as a retreat and a recourse for healing is thus repeatedly
celebrated against the actual background of political conflict and social
battle, from Thomas Hardy to the post-World War II poets. But the country
is not, of course, immune to change, and writers have also registered the
disruptive forces of industrialisation in provincial towns, even on the moors.
During the Victorian Age, in many ways the forerunner of both modern
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 157

achievements and contradictions, Thomas Carlyles suggestive prose in


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

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

Macaulays words echo a strong literary tradition, which includes


Fielding, Defoe and Jane Austen, traverses the eighteenth-century novel
and reaches down to the twentieth century. It is an important cultural and
literary paradigm, one that fascinated Henry James with its reiterated topoi
of taste and the English gentry, who often commuted from the busy
158 Locatelli

capital to their beautiful and comfortable country houses.


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

This quotation was chosen as a kind of concluding statement, because


it demonstrates once more the role of literature in shaping psycho-
geographies of enjoyment and surprise in the small world of the English
countryside.

Protected Spaces Beyond the Museification


of the Countryside

Historical research and literary texts show that the creation of a rural myth,
more often than not, has found fresh impetus whenever the interests and
daily lives of working people were being threatened and destroyed in
order to meet the needs of rampant industrialisation and capital interests.
Celebrating what is being destroyed, what has been destroyed and what
will predictably soon be destroyed has been the intrinsic ambivalence
in the rural myth ever since the inception of industrialism. This trend is
Literary Configuration of The English Countryside 159

obviously confirmed in our hyper-technological world of global capitalism.


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

References

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

Pirjo Lyytikinen

Evoking the thousands of lakes where the stars of the night glimmer,
the Finnish poet Aleksis Kivi (183472) expressed his national romantic
spirit: the poem was entitled Finland.1 This poemin Finnishwas an
answer to Our Country2 (1848), verses by the then famous national poet
Johan Ludvig Runeberg (180477), who wrote in Swedishthe standard
language of the educated in nineteenth-century Finland. Although Kivi
used more vivid and emotionally-laden images to describe his homeland,
both poems describe the country as a land of thousands of lakes.
Beginning with Runeberg and throughout this period, the image of Finland
as the land of thousands of lakesnow a clich in tourist literaturewas
forged. It is based on the geographical reality that the country has over
180,000 lakes, but this fact acquired cultural significance only through the
construction work of the national romantic authors and landscape painters,
that is, through a nationalist ideological and emotional perspective.3

1
The original title was Suomenmaa. The lines in Finnish read siell tuhansissa
jrviss / yn thdet kimmelt. The poem by Kivi, the first important author
writing in Finnish, remained unpublished during his lifetime. Its final version is
probably from 1867. (Kivi 1984, 14142, and comments, 230.) Compare the image
of a thousand stars that kiss the sleeping waves in Zacharias Topeliuss poem
Metaren (The Angler, 1846) (Topelius 2010, 13133).
2
The original title was Vrt land, Runeberg 1931, 1315.
3
Here, we are dealing with cultural nationalism and the invention of the nation
(what Hobsbawm [1992, 12] called phases A and B of nationalism), the imagining
of a nation and the construction of an imagined community (if we understand
Benedict Andersons term to refer to the result or desired end-product of the cultural
and political activity that took place in Finland from about 1830 to 1917 (when
the country, previously an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire from
18081809, became independent). On the role of landscapes, see Haila (1997,
13133) and Thiesse (1999, 18590). Hyrynen (2008, 48384 and 5078 also
162 Lyytikinen

Literary lakescapes or representations of lakes in the literature of national


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

points out recent uses of the concept of national landscapes in the debates about
protecting nationally valued sites.
4
The parallel development in landscape painting has been thoroughly analysed,
especially by Ville Lukkarinen (2004) in Suomi-kuvasta mielenmaisemaan.
(Finland: From picture to mindscape). This book also illuminates parallel
developments in literary imagining and has been a source of inspiration for my
chapter. For other instances of this endeavour characteristic of nineteenth-century
cultural nationalism, see e.g. Olwig (2008, 1214 and 2124) and Cabanel (2006,
3136).
5
This is not to say that lakescapes are not important later in literature (in many
respects they are); but nationally, the highly charged early periods seem to me to be
the most interesting. This interest together with the practical matter of limited space
informed the choice of my theme here.
6
Nikula (2006, 25356) emphasises the role of lakescapes in marketing Finnish
modernist architecture and design from the 1950s.
Lakescapes in Literature 163

Lakescapes Enhancing Patriotism

In the nineteenth century defining and describing national landscapes


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

7
See Hobsbawm 1992, 97.
8
See e.g. Cabanel 2006, 3839.
9
It is necessary to mention that I am dealing only with one portion of the nationally
significant landscapes, although perhaps the most important.
164 Lyytikinen

was accessible to the nationalists imaginative efforts. The appropriation of


what was in some sense the other, ideologically transformed to be the
innermost essence of the self, is at the core of this kind of emotionally-
laden nationalism.10
Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the first national poet and the poet still most
often referred to by that title, played a decisive role in turning the focus
to inland lakescapes. He himself was born on the northwestern coast, but
learned to love the lake district of middle Finland, when he worked as a
tutor for a wealthy family in Saarijrvi and Ruovesi, two communes reputed
ever since for their beauty.11 In the lake district he found the authentic
Finnish folk whom he idealised, as well as the lakes and forests that seemed
to reflect the Finnish national spirit, particularly its calmness. His epic poem
Hanna (1836), an idyllic love story set in a country parsonage situated by a
beautiful lake, seems to convey the poets own experience. Here, the son of
the parson presents the scenery to a friend who is born and lives in a coastal
town by emphasising how even the rosy shimmer of a summer evening on
the lake is different from the sea over there; he goes on:
Here is greenery and colours and liveliness. Countless islands rise from the
waves . . . and if you approach this cape, which seems to touch the land,
larger waters open and cosy villages on the strands you discern, the church
shining far away.12 (SA II, 11920)

The implication is that somehow all this beauty is lacking in the coastal region
from which both young men have just come to the speakers parental home.
The beautiful, continuously calm lakescape in Hanna is the setting for
the story of first love between the parsons daughter Hanna and the friend
10
See e.g. Tiitta 1994, 4445; Haila 1997, 132; and Lukkarinen 2004, 70. The
option to become Finns was also a political choice after the separation of Finland
from Sweden, articulated by one of the first nationalists: We are not Swedes,
we cannot become Russians, let us be Finns (attributed to A. I. Arwidsson). The
Russian government was particularly suspicious of any Finnish connections to
Sweden, of which Finland was formerly a part, but saw the moderate development
of Finnish cultural nationalism more or less as a way to distance the Finns from
Swedish political influence.
11
Runeberg spent his summers there between 1823 and 1826.
12
The authors free translation (the original Swedish text is in hexameter): Hr
r grnska och frger och lif. Otaliga holmar/ skjuta ur vgorna opp, och svajande
vinka frn alla/ lummiga trn, som bjuda den trttade roddaren skugga./ Nalkas du
udden, som nu tycks trffa det mtande landet, ppnas en vidare rymd af vatten, och
trefliga byar/ skynta p strnderna fram, och kyrkan lyser I fjerran. The description
goes on, depicting fields and forests.
Lakescapes in Literature 165

of her brother, unfolding with an ease only possible in a summer night


idyll. The three young people climb the local hill where the midsummer
bonfires are to be lighted later in the evening; they admire the panorama,
the endless tableau of forests, lakes and fields, in the rosy shimmer of
the evening. The young people of the village also are gathering, arriving
at the foot of the hill. There is no wind; only a love song, cowbells and
a cowherds horn are heard. The atmosphere of a pastoral idyll combines
with the magical midsummer night in a suggestive way.13 The nationalist
agenda is not very conspicuous or self-conscious in all this: it was only in
light of subsequent developments that Hanna became one of the icons of
national romanticism and a source of inspiration for further representations
of lake settings.
Runebergs role in creating outright patriotic lakescapes was balanced
by his attempt to take the whole country into account,14 but he established
a prototype of a strongly patriotic lakescape in the poem The Fifth of
July,15 part of his second collection of patriotic war poems called Tales
of Ensign Sthl (1860),16 his most important contribution to Finnish
nationalism. In The Fifth of July, Runeberg has old Lieutenant Sthl lead
the young student, who functions as his intratextual audience, to the shore
of a blue lake glimmering in the summer morning. The lieutenant asks the
student if he would be willing to die for this country, which is exemplified
by the beautiful lakescape. The student does not reply in words, but his
looks betray an emotion that satisfies the lieutenant, who goes on to explain
that the beautiful scenery is part of what the student calls his homeland.
In the above-mentioned poem Our Country, intentionally written to
be Finlands national anthem, Runeberg enumerates the countrys natural

13
But the classical and Weimar models (central to his poetics) seemed to force
Runeberg to move the culmination point of the love story to a nearby spring, a locus
amoenus, where the lovers can see each other in the mirroring water and recognise
their mutual love (the scene echoes not only the classical topos but also, more
specifically, Goethes Hermann und Dorothea).
14
Describing ones country by listing all of its notable places and landscapes was
another fashion of nationalism, both in poetry and in travel literature, as well as in
other kinds of non-fictional works. See Tiitta, 280313, especially on the role of
Topelius in this endeavour.
15
Den femte juli, SA III, 137141.
16
This is the usual translation of the title, but the English title of Clement B. Shaws
translation is The Songs of Ensign Stl. The original title was Fnrik Stls sgner.
The first part was published in 1848 and immediately became a breviary of Finnish
nationalism; the second part was also a long-awaited event; see Lyytikinen 2012,
140142.
166 Lyytikinen

features such as hills and dales and strands without really describing
detailed sceneries,17 coining the expression land of a thousand lakes and
reminiscent, in a way, of The Fifth of July with references to what our
eye sees and how we can stretch our hand / and happily show the lake
and strand / and say: this land there / our homeland is.18 In The Fifth of
July the tendency to inventory gains ground: the beautiful lake scenery,
which is geographically situated in Virrat in the middle of Finland, gives
rise to an enumeration of other beautiful places that are important sites of
patriotic love. In addition to the shores of Lake Saimaa (the biggest lake
in Finland), a river (the Vuoksi) and the internationally-known rapids of
Imatra are mentioned. But the lieutenant also lists the hills of Lapland
and the seashore at the Gulf of Bothnia (where Runeberg was born). The
diversity of the country is briefly given its due, even if the characters are
experiencing the beauty of the country on the lake in Virrat. All this frames
the story of the brave soldier (Duncker), who was mortally wounded in a
battle on 5 July 1809 defending his country in the war against Russia, the
anniversary being the occasion of telling the story and testing the patriotism
of the student. The message is clear: Finland is worth sacrificing ones
lifebecause it is so beautiful! The idyllic lakescape sets up the patriotic
lesson.19 Furthermore, a lake metaphor is used to describe the everlasting
fame of the self-sacrifice: to die like Duncker means to defy the lake of
oblivion, to rise like a green-dressed island out of the lakes waves, to
die and not to die (SA III, 141).
Runebergs example of glorifying the inland lake districts was
followed by others. The most important nationalist poem to concentrate on
describing lakes is Summer day in Kangasala (1853/1860) by Zacharias
Topeliuss (181898).20 Topelius was one of the prominent Fennomans
17
Runebergs classical training and the influence of Weimar classicism attenuated
the romantic elements in his poetry. The whole idea of describing particular
sceneries is itself romantic, and Runeberg is not quite free from universalising
tendencies, even when he gives in to romantic tendencies.
18
Authors translation from the Swedish original, SA III, 1415. I have used my
own translation instead of the English metrical translation of The Songs of Ensign
Stl (1925, 6) to convey the exact content of the original. Still, Shaws translations
have been helpful background.
19
On the ideological tendencies of the war poetry in Ensign Stl, see Lyytikinen
2012, 14346.
20
En sommardag i Kangasala. Originally the poem had a different title; this
title dates from 1860 (Lassila 2011, 107). Although Runeberg was there before
Topelius and one of his epic poems Zigenaren (The Gypsy) mentions the ridge
in Kangasala and its lakes, the verses do not develop the description. Some of
Lakescapes in Literature 167

and Finns not speaking Finnish; he created a national history for Finland,
glorified Finnish scenery and described the various people and landscapes
in different parts of the country.21 His achievements in the field of lyric
poetry have remained in the shadow of Runebergs, but this poem, in which
the supposed speaker is the bird Sylvia (from the family of warblers, which
sing so beautifully), was a success. Composed into song by Gabriel Linsn
in1864 and translated into Finnish by P. J. Hannikainen, the poem lives on.
Although Runebergs idyllic panoramic scene in Hanna could serve as a
partial model, Topeliuss verse is the first openly patriotic poem to focus on
a lake panorama.
The bird Sylvia views the scene from the highest branch of a tree on the
highest ridge of Harjula, a name invented by Topelius, which means The
Place of Ridges. The designation refers to the characteristic landscape of
Kangasala, an inland parish in a lake district. What the bird sees is how
broadly shine the blue waters, / as far as the eye can see (Topelius 2010,
204, my translation).22 The poem names the (real) lakes seen by the bird,
briefly mentions their graceful waves or their silver and golden glimmer
and compares one of them to the eyes of a beloved and to a childhood
home: And blue like a loved ones eyes / And bright like a childhood
home / The swaying Vesijrvi / quietly joining them all. / And hundreds of
islands swim / In its vast lap, / Natures green thoughts / In a haven of blue
waves (my translation).23
The numerous islands characteristic of many Finnish lakes are
mentioned and elevated to natures green thoughts. The surrounding
forests are described with a reference to fields and meadows, obligatory
in these picturesque panoramas.24 The last three stanzas of the poem then
develop a theme of patriotism inspired by the scenery. The message is

Topeliuss other poems with waterscapes connect closely with Runebergs idyllic
lakescapes.
21
Topeliuss role in defining the variety of national landscapes and a great number
of particular lakescapes in his non-fiction was enormous. In Finland framstldt i
teckningar (Finland Presented in Drawings) (184552) for which he wrote the text,
he describes several famous lakescapes and also repeats the idea that islands are
green thoughts (Tiitta 1994, 282283).
22
Vidt skina de bla vatten, / S lngt de af gat ns.
23
Och bl som en lsklings ga, / Och klar som ett barndomshem, / Den gungande
Wesijrvi / Sig stilla smyger till dem. / Och hundrade ar simma / Allt uti dess vida
famn, / Naturens grna tankar / I bla vgornas hamn.
24
Runebergs example is only the immediate context; both authors follow more
international conventions of panoramas (with or without lakes), although the
adaptations to the local nature in each case provide variety.
168 Lyytikinen

given: O how poor Finland / yet is rich with beauty!25 The poem also
emphasises how Finnish traditional songs (or poems) imitate the undulation
of the waves, thus combining Finnish folklore with the lakes. The poem
ends with the birds wish to be like the eagle, able to fly to the throne of
God and beseech him to make us (the Finns) love our country: O
God, teach us how to love, / o teach us to love our country!26
Topeliuss poem contributed to the vogue of national romantic
pilgrimages to sites where lake panoramas were at their best. Topelius
himself, fleeing a cholera outbreak in Helsinki in 1853, ended up in
Kangasala, a region famous for its healthy waters, as well as for its
picturesque scenery. His poem invested the place with patriotic significance.
The discovery and redefinition of many other lake panoramas followed, and
the topos of the high place, a ridge or rocky hill with a lake panorama, which
permits the viewer to see an infinite continuum of glimmering lakes and
dark forests disappearing into a blue haze, established itself in literature, in
the fine arts, in travel writing, and in the national cultural memory.27 This
literature also promoted early tourism: the summer time pilgrimages to the
lake districts in Finland became almost a duty of patriotic youth, who had
the leisure time to travel and could afford to do so. At the same time realist
novels often gave descriptions of these pilgrimages, thereby spreading the
idea of patriotic tourism, even if mass pilgrimages became a fashion
and possibility only much later, after the Second World War.28 Thus, the
experiences of real spaces were transformed by imagining the places and
through the literary creation of what became nationally significant psychic
spaces.29 The ritual of admiring these lake panoramas and enacting the
psychic spaces was facilitated by the building of towers commanding the
best lake panoramas. Topelius had to imagine a bird at the top of a tree to
provide the reader with the kind of view available from these towers.
During the heyday of national development at the end of the nineteenth

25
O hur den fattiga Finland / r rikt p sknhet nd! (Topelius 2010, 204).
26
O Herre, lr oss att lska, / o lr oss lska vrt land! (1860 version; see Topelius
2010, 465).
27
Its role in Finnish literature has been emphasised by Laitinen (1984, 3241).
28
Scholars have called attention to the urban background of exalting nature.
Lukkarinen, for example, who discusses Nicholas Greens and Griselda Pollocks
views (2004, 71), points out that Finnish nature tourism initially promoted
wilderness spots instead of existing tourist destinations.
29
Edward S. Caseys (2002, 5051) description of the sublimation of place seems to
fit both the processes involved in literary and artistic representation of the national
sublime and the experiences brought forth by these representations.
Lakescapes in Literature 169

century, the pictorial arts played a decisive role in spreading ideal


lakescapes, often inspired by the literary tradition. The lake panorama, now
heavily laden with national meaning, was depicted in countless paintings
and drawings (and, increasingly in photographs), especially in the 1880s
and 1890s. Sometimes it was used to illustrate nationally important
literature. Albert Edelfelts illustrations for the jubilee edition of Runebergs
Tales of Ensign Sthl (18981900) portrayed lake panoramas instead of war
panoramas (which are completely lacking ) and illustrated Our Country as
well as The Fifth of July with lakescapes, thus emphasising the patriotic
role of nature and landscape presentations.30 Connecting lakescapes and
war at the end of the century when the achievements of cultural nationalism
were under threat indicated how nature painting and literary descriptions of
nature began to function as political allegories under Russian censorship.31
As representations of the country, the lake panoramas became
increasingly nostalgic: the period of intensive veneration of the lake
panoramas in painting coincides with the great expansion of the forest
industry, which used the lakes as waterways for transporting logs from the
forests to the factories and sawmills.32 In naturalist literature the tension
between the nationalist lore that seemed to define the national in terms
of primordial traditions and untouched nature and the modernisation
processes that rapidly changed the country and served to fortify the
nation economically become apparent, even if the tensionin itself very
modernbetween the cherished archaic ideals and the modern industrial
development remained unresolved.33

Lakes and the Paradoxes of National Naturalism

In Finland lake settings figure prominently in important naturalist novels,


which describe life in the countryside or in small towns rather than city
life. In these texts the scenes where lakes have symbolic value are often

30
See Lukkarinen 2004, 3536, 3843.
31
Lukkarinen 2004, 2634, Konttinen 2001, 22036.
32
Lukkarinen 2004, 5260.
33
Gellners view of nationalism (adopted in many contemporary studies)
emphasises the modernity of nationalism (see also John Breuillys introduction
[Gellner 2006, xxxxi]), but the nationalists themselves often searched for national
roots in primordial times and pre-modern conditions. In nineteenth-century
thinking, modernity, urbanity and tehnological development were often seen as
cosmopolitism issues that threatened national values.
170 Lyytikinen

connected to the erotic dimensions of the plots, but, as we will see, the
role of national allegories is also important. The national romantic
tradition resonates there, although the authors roots in the lake districts
often contributed to the prominence of lakes as settings for their stories.
The most important author in this respect is Juhani Aho (18611921),
who brought French-style naturalism to Finnish literature while at the
same time emphasising Finnishness through scenery and characters.34
Aho, a parsons son from the eastern lake district, adopted the lake setting
and the lake panorama, making continuous references to Runebergs
idyllic epic poem Hanna, but reinterpreted its elements in his naturalist
novel Papin rouva (The parsons wife), 1893, which can also be seen as
a national transformation of Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary with
its triangle drama.35 Like Hanna, Papin rouva combines national imagery
with an erotic plot, but constructs a counter-image to Runebergs love
idyll. This relationship is prepared right from the beginning of the novel,
where the text introduces the lakeside setting. It describes the calm and
idyllic outward impression imparted by the parsonage, where the Charles
Bovary-like parson lives with his wife, when seen from the lake. The
name of the place, situated on a picturesque bay of a great lake, confirms
this impression: Tyynel (the place of calm).36 The parallel to Runebergs
parsonage, which is also mirrored in the calm waters of the home bay, is
clear, but the tone of the description is altered. The tranquillity of Ahos lake
reveals its sinister side. His naturalist drama is essentially an inner tragedy
with a deadly calm on the surface. The references to Runeberg accentuate
the theme of disillusion: the parsons wife Elli dreams of a perfect love, but
her hopes are never fulfilled.
The novels triangle involves the dull and comical parson, an appealing
summer visitor to the parsonage with French elegance and womanising
habits (Olavi) and the parsons attractive, romance-hungry wife, Elli, who
has never loved her husband, but pressured by her parents, agreed to marry
him. Yet she loves Olavi, whom she had met briefly before marrying the

34
Rossi (2007) shows Ahos intimate connections to French naturalism (on Ahos
French connections, see also Nummi 2002). Niemi 1985 has highlighted some
central elements that foreground Finnishness. The anthology Pariisista Iisalmeen
2011 is also devoted to Ahos national vs. international influences, themes and
ideas.
35
In 1943, the novel was translated into French by Jean Perrin dAgnel as La femme
du pasteur.
36
The reader may also discern an allusion to Tuonela, the place of death in Finnish
mythology.
Lakescapes in Literature 171

pastor.37 The first lake scene shows Elli gazing at the open lake, immersed
in memories of dreaming by the lakeshore. She is waiting for her saviour
to arrive from across the lake when she notices waves stirring the calm
water. They are caused by a steamer, which is bringing not only goods and
summer travellers to the villages and towns on the lakes shores, but also
modern influences. Steamboats functioned as a sign of modern development
and had a role comparable to railways in naturalist literature.38 In this scene
the steamship brings Olavi, who represents modern decadence, to the
parsonage, where he upsets the deadly calm of the parsons wife.
Ahos novel presents the heroine Elli in the situation of Emma Bovary
before her love affairs, but he gives Elli a distinctively Finnish background
by comparing her to the maiden Aino from the national epic, the Kalevala:
Aino drowned herself to avoid an unwelcome suitor, the old Vinminen.
This interfigurality as well as the intertextual background in Hanna
emphasises the fall from the ideal: Elli is a more passive counterpart to
Aino; she has accepted the repulsive suitor and languishes in a dull and
unsatisfying marriage and even sometimes longs for death. Her habit of
dreaming by the lake recalls Ainos last moments before drowning, but Elli
lives. The arrival of Olavi revives her, but he is not the same enthusiastic
student whom she had known and with whom she had fallen in love. His
visits to Paris, which signifies a place of decadence in the Finnish literature
of the period, have changed him, and it becomes clear to the reader, if not
to Elli, that Olavi has not thought about her at all during those years. This
blas young man who is writing a dissertation on women in contemporary
French novels thinks of women only in terms of conquests. Thus
representing modernity, decadence and inauthenticity, he arrives at the
calm Finnish lake setting, which stands for tradition and Finnishness. This
setting is, however, an ambivalent one: it has lost its idyllic quality and has
become a breeding ground for unfulfilled desires.39 The lake itself seems to
take on this symbolism and become a mirror image of the heroine.
An important lake scene, which also has some resonance of the

37
This part of Ellis story is told in the novel Papin tytr (The parsons daughter),
which Aho had published in 1885 and which is a naturalist counter-story to Hanna.
There the young Elli falls in love with Olavi, but he leaves her to travel abroad.
38
Aho himself alternately used both locomotives and steamships to symbolise the
confrontation between tradition oblivious to the feelings of the modest parsons
daughter. and modernity (see e.g. Rossi 2007, 100 and 1056).
39
An allusion to Hanna, in which the parsons daughter is first tempted by an old
suitor, but is saved from unfulfilled desires by the arrival of the right paramour,
accentuates the differences in Ellis situation.
172 Lyytikinen

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

The monotonous calm attached to a nationally significant lakescape hides


strong passions. But the hero now lacks the exaltation and authenticity of
feeling required of harmonious loveeither in erotic terms or in national
scale. Runebergs and the national romantics three-fold sublimation
of lovefrom erotic to patriotic and, ultimately, to love of Godis
completely broken.
Still, Olavi lets loose in his poetic mood (though he feels that he is
exaggerating) and refers to an important intertext, the poem Svanen
(The Swan) by Runeberg. This poem, a glorification of the beauty of the
North and its summer, and also of true love on the streams of the North,
idealises the scene, and Olavi gives a platonic interpretation of the feeling
it describes, which is a feeling of friendship, not erotic love. Evoking this
image of ideal love by referring to the national lore fascinates Elli, who
believes that Olavis fleeting poetic vision sincerely reflects his thoughts,
but, at the same time, it shows how alien to the modern decadent sensibility
Lakescapes in Literature 173

this image has become.


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

to authentic, pre-modern life reflect the contradictions and ambiguities


of the authors situation and the national situation of the time. Even the
fact that the novel presents its naturalist drama by constantly referring
to the beauty of the surrounding natural setting and its national romantic
connotations creates an ambivalent, nostalgic mood, which reflects the
recognition of the inevitable process of modernisation shaping the national
landscape as well as the national mentality and, at the same time, regrets
the losses. The naturalist drama is an allegorical drama of modernisation,
depicting everything that is bound to be lost or lose its purity. But at the
same time the dsillusion concerns only middle-class protagonists: Ahos
novel still depicts a hardworking tenant farmer family in idyllic terms and
constructs a counter-image to Ellis and Olavis story.
While nineteenth-century naturalism did not seriously question the
central icons of national memory, the landscape or the ideal of the Finnish
folk incarnated in the rural people, the beginning of the twentieth century
and the advent of the socialist workers movement and, finally, the bitter
Civil War (1918), which contaminated Finlands newly-won independence,
changed the picture. In an important neo-naturalist novel by Joel Lehtonen
(18811934) the changing image of the Finnish people is connected to an
allegorical lakescape. In his great Putkinotko (1919) the author uses his
description of Saimaa, Finlands largest lake, to create an image of the
national scene. Although the novel was written after the Civil War, it is set
in the pre-war years and describes the growing social tensions.
Lake Saimaa with its open waters symbolises Finland, which has
contact with the wider world and wider views. The lake is the great
waterway to the outside world, even to Saint Petersburg and the Baltic
Sea, via a canal. It permits echoes of the modern world to enter the novels
world as well. The text, however, distinguishes between two different
parts and two different images of the lake; these differences function as
allegorical references to the social division within the country. There are
Saimaas great open waters, but these do not reach the area of Putkinotko,
the main setting for the novels action, where the primitive tenant family
lives who is the focus of the narrative. There the lake narrows to a maze
of slender straits and passages strewn with small rocky islands and rugged
capes. The description of this part of the lake, while seemingly realistic,
also symbolises the primitive life of the Oblomovian family, who live
in ignorance and poverty. They have only the faintest ideas of modern
developments, and most of those ideas are flawed, despite the fact that the
nearest town, Savonlinna, situated on the more open waters of the lake, is
not far away. In the straits surrounded by rocks and wilderness, where there
Lakescapes in Literature 175

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

From Lakescapes to Mindscapes

The traditional national imagery was often reinterpreted by fin-de-sicle


symbolists, who assigned universal significance to local images as
well as to national myths. In symbolist poetics the mimetically-rendered
objects and sceneries were supposed to suggest ideas and states of mind
(tats dme).41 Any object, figure or place functioned metaphorically to

40
Rossi (2011, 95110) emphasises the connection as well as the differences in the
then fashionable ideas about primitive people. The comparison with American
indians follows the usage of the time; see Lukkarinen 2004, 77.
41
According to Mallarms famous dictum in Sur lvolution littraire (1891).
In this process of symbolisation, the heroes and stories of the national mythology
(in Finland, the Kalevala) became the archetypes of human imagination (e.g. the
universal mythology tracing the archetypical figures of humankind propagated
176 Lyytikinen

evoke spiritual realities. Consequently, lakescapes became mindscapes:


while mimetically still anchored in natural spaces, although not particular
places, they evoked states of mind. Thus, lakescapes either lost their
national significance or retained it primarily as an echo of the past and a
nostalgic reminiscence. In symbolist imagery waterscapes often function as
a metaphor for the mind itself: the surface of a lake (consciousness) is seen
as the limit or the interface between the engulfing depth of the underwater
world populated by strange monsters (the unconscious) and the unreachable
silent heavens, where empty space has replaced divine benevolence (the
lost or unknown ideal).
The most prominent Finnish symbolist poet to write important lake
poems was Otto Manninen (18721950), who was born in Finlands eastern
lake district. His waterscapes survey the poets (or the lyrical subjects)
mind in several works, some of which evoke the glimmering stars mirrored
by lakes, which Aleksis Kivi turned into a national image, but which, with
Manninen, signify the speakers mindscape. Manninens most suggestive
lake poem, however, is Joutsenet (The swans),42 an ecstatic vision
reminiscent of W. B. Yeatss The Wild Swans at Coole,43 yet also evoking
Finlands national tradition, especially Runebergs poetry.44 The speakers
mindscape is presented as the reflective surface of a lake on which swans,
like dreams and ideas, swim and are mirrored.
Manninens symbolism owes little to the older romantic strand of
making lakes the scenes of epiphany, represented by Runebergs poem
The Church (1842),45 although the idea of nature as a church or a holy
place as expressed by Runeberg and the church bells from afar as heard
in both poems lends Manninens verses part of their magical atmosphere,
which connote the revelation of an ideal world. But Runebergs religious
epiphany is replaced by symbolist ideas connected to the image of the swan.
The reference above to Runebergs The Swan with its theme of faithful

by Edouard Schur). See Lyytikinen 2004, 2012 and Lyytikinen 1997, 4446
and 65.
42
The final poem was published in the collection Skeit (Verses), 1905, but it was
first published in a periodical (1903) and written even earlier.
43
For the frequent swan imagery of the fin-the-sicle and its back-ground in
tradition see also Goss 2009, 21323.
44
Manninen translated a large number of Runebergs works into Finnish, and his
poems often reflect what he translated (see Karhu 2012, 15459 and 173200).
45
Kyrkan in Dikter III (Poems III). Runebergs poem makes the lake and an
island on it a place of communion with God, thereby implying that these are even
more appropriate places of worship than a church.
Lakescapes in Literature 177

love complements the symbolism: Manninens The Swans, depicting


swans on a summer lake, uses the lake scenery to convey a nostalgic vision
of ideal beauty and express the ecstatic love inspired by the swans.
The magic of Manninens poem emerges from a combination of detailed
and seemingly realistic description with suggestive symbolism to refer to
phenomena of the mind. Although the title gives away the protagonists
who swim on the lake at sunrise in spring or early summer, the swans are
never mentioned in the poem: they are referred to only as they and with
metaphorical expressions such as snowynecks and the white dreams
of the waves.46 These expressions with their connotations of beauty and
the mind of the visionary speaker suggest the mindscape constructed by
the imagery. The swans also blend with the white water lilies, the flowers
preferred in symbolist poetry.47 These flowers, which have their roots in
the muddy lake bottoms, but raise their pure white blooms on the surface,
symbolise the roots of human ideas in the darkness of the unconscious
and the intertwining of the dark side of the human psyche with its highest
spiritual desires and achievements. In Manninens poem the swans seem,
however, to be relatively free of this intertwinement; they swim freely on
the lakes surface, the surface of the poets mind. Manninens swans are
ideas or mental pictures, dream visions. They symbolise the beauty and the
sublime desired by dreaming consciousness or the limpid surface of the
mind, which, like the lake that is the minds image in the poem, hides the
depths and only mirrors the beauty of the swans and the serenity of the
summer morning.
The Platonic theme of Eros, which emerges from a vision of earthly
beauty to become a vision of the Ideal and often found in Manninens
poems, is doubly pertinent: it suggests the motif of earthly love evoked
by the Runeberg intertext The Swan, which is sublimated into a
more general vision. Manninens swans are not the mute swans (who,
in symbolist poetry, only sing at the moment of their death), but singing
swans (the whooper swan, Cygnus cygnus), who sing when they are happy
(Manninen uses the word joikua, which lends assonance to the poem and

46
Topeliuss islands as natures green thoughts are here replaced by snow-white
dreams, but the waves are connected to singing and poetry in a way that is also
reminiscent of Topeliuss lake panorama.
47
For example, in his Le Nnuphar blanc Mallarm evokes the water lilies,
which envelop in their whiteness a nothing, made of intact dreams, a paradox
of emptiness and fullness, ideal beauty rooted in the muddy depths (Levine 1994,
13233). The image was much used in Finnish symbolism as well (see Lyytikinen
1997, 6472).
178 Lyytikinen

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

48
As widely used, joiku refers to a style of singing used by the Smi people of
Lapland and can be associated with the real voices of the singing swan, Cygnus
cygnus.
49
This change in Russian politics is briefly explained in Anderson 2006, 87.
50
In fact, a whole culture of reading political allegory into every nature description
Lakescapes in Literature 179

the national mourning.


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

and landscape painting spread at the time; see e.g. Konttinen 2001, 22024;
Lukkarinen 2004, 3134.
180 Lyytikinen

Conclusions

Lakescapes continued and still continue to play a role in Finnish literature.


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

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litteratursllskapet i Finland
IV

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

Julia Faisst

Introduction: Sites of Slavery as Literary Topos and


Material Places

Domestic sites of slaverynamely plantation homes with their strict


division between slave quarters and masters houseare most commonly
read as narratives of controlled labour, abuse of power and harm done
to body and mind.1 The same holds true for fictional depictions of the
spaces and places of slavery. The prototype for the plantation as a space
of unequal power relations can be found in many African American
slave narratives, mostly autobiographical, albeit somewhat fictionalised
accounts written by former slaves after the end of the American Civil
War.2 Both non-fiction and fiction of the twentieth century continue to
make us familiar or even confront us with these sites of slavery, such as
William Faulkners modernist writings, which chronicle life in the South
before the Civil War. In particular, his novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
revolves around the story of a plantation, Sutpens Hundred, complete
with an ostentatious mansion the size of a courthouse (Faulkner 1990,
10). Sutpens Hundred is built on one hundred square miles of land

1
On the architectural settings of plantation slavery generally, see Vlach 1993. A
succinct summary of the social history of plantation architecture can be found in
Wright 1981. Dennis J. Pogue (2002) uses Mount Vernon, George Washingtons
eighteenth-century plantation, as an example of various types of slave housing,
and Jeffrey E. Klee (2007) provides insight into slavery architecture in the urban
environment of Savannah, Georgia.
2
See, for example, Jacobs (2000) and Frederick Douglasss three autobiographies:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, My Bondage and
My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, all collected in Douglass
1994.
186 Faisst

appropriated from a tribe of ignorant Indians, nobody knows how, by


a man who came out of nowhere, with the help of a French architect
(Faulkner 1990, 10).33 In its structure the house mirrors the rise and fall
of the Sutpen familys fortunes and moral degeneration, brought about
by the fate of its involuntary inhabitants, namely the domestic and field
slaves. The fate of the house mirrors the fate of the nation. As Marilyn
Chandler puts it, it provides a story of expropriation, settlement,
empire-building, destruction, and dubious hope of reconstruction on
questionable terms (Chandler 1991, 249). This article addresses the
interrelation between plantation architecture and social order from an
alternative angle by asking the following questions: Could the plantation,
beyond being considered a site of imperialism and colonialism, also be
described as a locale of transcultural and transracial contactand give
rise to a distinctly modern form of cosmopolitanism that emerges among
the members of the various races inhabiting it?
To start with, I look at representations of the so-called plantation
complex in novels from the past forty years, including Ishmael Reeds
Flight to Canada (1976) and Charles Johnsons Oxherding Tale (1982),
and especially Toni Morrisons A Mercy (2008). A Mercy probably
provides the least familiar view of colonial servitude in early America.
Here, seventeenth-century America functions as a space where the racial
divide unfolded gradually, one colony at a time, and as a space that,
significantly, united rather than separated persons of disparate nationalities
and races (Jennings 2009, 645). But the novels by Ishmael Reed, Charles
Johnson and Toni Morrison all depict plantation homes as spaces of
transcultural permeability. Thereby these authors approach the plantation
complex from a decidedly present(ist) perspective, acknowledging how
this space haunts the national psyche to this day. They show how the
imagination of architectural cosmopolitanism is used as an aesthetic and
political strategy, and they rethink the infamous spatial metaphor of the
W. E. B. Du Boisian colour line as a mobile and transformative site of
multi-racialism, where voices from various continents are given more
equal spaceboth physically and stylistically. 44 What is more, these
recent authors present homeplaces as what bell hooks describes as site[s]

3
For extended discussions of architecture in Faulkner, see Chandler 1991, Ruzicka
1987 and Sundquist 1985.
4
Here I am referring to Samira Kawashs statement (2001, 67) that the metaphor
of the color line itself is not biological, but spatial [marking] architectural or
geographical boundaries and social distinctions and divisionswherein the colour
line is understood primarily as a geographical marker of division.
Sites of Slavery 187

of resistance and liberation struggle (hooks 1990, 43). Historically,


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

Significantly, a book such as Morrisons A Mercy expanded on this


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

Literary Representations of Plantation Architecture

Let me begin by explaining the set-up of slavery sites as presented in


literature. Both Ishmael Reeds and Charles Johnsons novels are comic
reinterpretations of traditional slave narratives, and the authors depict
alternative types of architectures in order to overstep the boundaries
between master and slave. Johnsons Oxherding Tale is narrated by
Andrew Hawkins, the son of a slave, who tells the story of the South
Carolina plantation on which his father George worked in the antebellum
South. Ironically named Cripplegate, the plantation is a distant place, a
ruin now, mere parable (Johnson 1995, 3)a parable also because, at
Cripplegate, George becomes an integral part of the masters house and
takes over its most intimate space, the bedroom. After getting drunk
with his master on the front porch, George stayed clear of his cabin
(Johnson 1995, 3) and his wife. Instead, he and the master switch places
in each others bed. Georges literal and metaphorical journey on his way
up is marked by his careful climb up the staircase. In racial, social and
architectural terms, he moves upward to the refined, neo-classical European
style that was all the rage in masters houses at the time:
His Masters house was solid and rich; it was established, quiet, and so
different from the squalid quarters, with vases, a vast library, and great
rooms of imported furniture . . . a house of such heavily upholstered
luxuriance that George now took small, mincing steps for fear of breaking
something. (Johnson 1995, 56)5

On reaching the bedroom, George fathers the son who becomes the narrator
of this rather hilarious tale. Literally turning hierarchies on their head, the
novel not only blurs the strict borderline between slave and master, but
also engages in quite the remarkable gender reversal: instead of a master
begetting a child with a slave woman, a frequent event on plantations, in
Oxherding Tale we encounter a male slave fathering a son with the white
mistress of the house.
If the memory of the Big House is transmitted through the sons
narrative in Johnsons novel, the plantation home in Ishmael Reeds satirical
slave eyes view of the Civil War, Flight to Canada, from 1976, is just
something on display at the [Toronto] Museum (Reed 1976, 90)at least

5
On how the Greek as well as the Gothic Revival mirrored the political ideology
of plantation architecture by constructing a paternalistic ideology in defense of
slavery, see Ellis and Haney 2007, 10.
Sites of Slavery 189

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

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

become a slave owneris negotiated through multiple reconstructions of


his home. But while his decline goes hand-in-hand with his desire for ever
more ornate and neo-classical architecture, his servants are carving out a
space for a cosmopolitan community. Like Johnsons and Reeds novels,
Morrisons is a narrative of origins: the beginning of a traders new life
in the early colonial system and the origins of the American empire. The
pre-national landscape through which Vaark journeys to take up life on an
inherited farm is characterised as a disorderly world, a place that is still a
mess (Morrison 2008a, 12). Only half a dozen years earlier, the peoples
war had united an ethnically diverse set of people: an army of blacks,
natives, whites, mulattoesfreedmen, slaves and indenturedhad waged
war against local gentry led by members of that very class (Morrison
2008a, 11). A Mercy marks a time when racial categories were still in flux.
It redacts history by countering the idea that the beginning of America
was coupled only with whiteness. Morrison shows us with allusions to
historical events and the legal documents that derived from them that an
early-white America was no more than a legally constructed myth. Vaark
recalls how, after the peoples war was lost, it brought about a thicket of
new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating gatherings,
travel and bearing arms for black people only [and] by granting license to
any white to kill any black for any reason, they separated and protected all
whites from all others forever (Morrison 2008a, 11-12). Thus, while early
America provided a space of experimentation in which race was, as of yet,
divided from slavery, we find ourselves, throughout the reading process,
on the cusp of the invention of black and white, of the genesis of white
privilege over black slaves, of the order of a new world to come and of
racism. We are called to imagine, in the words of Maxine L. Montgomery,
a fuller, more nuanced reading of Americas national history and its
diverse citizenry, and thus an alternative history of American origins
(Montgomery 2011, 635).
Ironically, the New World order can only come about through slave
labour. When Vaark tours the Jublio plantation, the estate of slave owner
Senhor DOrtega, a Portuguese Maryland planter who offers to pay off
outstanding debts with human beings, the Dutch trader finds a place that is
clean and well-kept. Its productivity, however, depends upon slave labour:
The mist had cleared and [Vaark] was able to see in detail the workmanship
and care of the tobacco sheds, wagons, row after row of barrelsorderly
and nicely keptthe well-made meat house, milk house, laundry,
cookhouse. All but the last, whitewashed plaster, a jot smaller than the slave
quarters but, unlike them, in excellent repair. (Morrison 2008a, 24)
Sites of Slavery 191

Initially, DOrtegas property and corporeal offer disgust Vaark: Flesh


was not his commodity, he states (Morrison 2008a, 25). Yet the empire
Vaark sees resting on the curve of DOrtegas eyebrow makes him, almost
despite himself, envy the house, the gate, the fence (Morrison 2008a, 27,
31). This newly acquired perspective stimulates the Dutchmans desire for
a similar kind of control: So mighten it be nice to have such a fence, a
fence to include the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too
far away, to build a house that size on his own property? (Morrison 2008a,
31). Blinded by his desire to become the architect of a similarly grandiose
home, Vaark accepts a little girl named Florens as payment. This barter
marks the beginning of his gradual corruption. Nonetheless, the diverse
personnel Vaark collects on his farm forms a transnational assembly
of outcasts . . . whose complex subjectivity defies reductive attempts at
racial categorization (Montgomery 2011, 627628). The members of this
group, including Vaark, are united in that all are either orphaned and/or
displaced. They include a Native American mother figure, Portuguese and
African slave girls, white indentured servants, an African blacksmith who
is free and becomes the fellow builder of Vaarks house (and thus eludes
racial classification particularly well) and, last but not least, a European
immigrant, Rebekka, who has come over from Britain to become Vaarks
wife. Each of these characters gets to speak in the various chapters. A
variety of traditionally unheard voices and disregarded perspectives thus
populates the plantation, a transnational space that functions as a kind of
extended, if not unambivalent, family configuration. As Valerie Babb puts
it, the novels narrative structure privileges no one voice over another
(Babb 2011, 149). In fact, it is hard to tell initially who is speaking in each
chapter. Throughout the reading process, the reader only slowly learns to
find his or her way through the multifarious and often rather idiosyncratic
speaking styles (which often deviate from what is generally considered
standard English) of the respective characters. In the space given to the
various characters to speak in his or her voice, each character assumes
the role of the narrator of his or her own story, including the slave girl
Florens. What makes her stand out, however, is that eventually she also
takes on the role of the writerliterally inscribing the architectural space
of the plantation with her own wordsand she appeals to the reader to
engage directly with these words. Otherwise, these words, like her story,
will remain unread, as if they had never existed. After Vaarks untimely
death, Florens scribbles her story all over the wooden floor of the grand
house, which has remained unfinished. As Florens puts it, There is no
more room in this room. These words cover the floor . . . If you [the reader]
192 Faisst

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

The Ideology of the Romance of the Old South


on the Postslavery Plantation

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

Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest
and most visited plantations in the United States, is one such example
of the disassociation of the atrocious circumstances of slavery from the
site where these atrocities took place. On its website Boone Hall entices
potential visitors with a slogan that presents the plantation as an attractive
place of discovery: Americas most photographed plantationcome see
why (http://boonehallplantation.com/). Tellingly, the aesthetic appeal
of the architectureboth the buildings and the landscape of which the
buildings are a partand images of romance take precedence over the facts
of slavery.
Sites of Slavery 193

Figure 91. Boone Hall Plantation, Ornamental Gate Leading to the


Masters House. Photograph Julia Faisst.

The visitor is free to enjoy, for instance, the ornamental beauty of a


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

Figure 92. Boone Hall Plantation, Oak AlleyMain Entryway.


Photograph Julia Faisst.

What is most likely to take root in memory, however, is the beauty of the
surroundings, rather than the collective history of slavery. Strolling down
this admittedly gorgeous canopied road, one may well be so absorbed by
the luscious crowns of these impressively tall trees that the row of brick
houses on the left go unnoticed. Alternatively, if one allows the small and
seemingly innocent homes to come into view, one might integrate them
mentally into a line of sight lining up neatly with the treesin other words,
a vista of a perfect example of a well-balanced and harmonious landscape
architecture.
Along with advertising and parading its aesthetic charms, the plantation
markets itself as a place for entertainment. Whether you take part in a fun-
filled family festival, make Boone Hall your wedding destination or spend
a Plantation Christmas there, the estate will provide good ole Southern
holiday hospitalityin other words, it will invoke the lost glamour of
the Old South in a romanticised manner (Boone Hall Plantation 2011). A
wedding party is sure to enjoy walking down the mile of 268 year old
giant live oaks draped with Spanish moss . . . [which] leads the way to over
300 years of history and beauty . . . creating a setting that is absolutely
breathtaking . . . and incomparable (Boone Hall Plantation 2011). It seems
no accident that the excited couples to be married and featured in the
promotional video of Boone Hall are all white (The Perfect Moment The
Perfect Place Boone Hall Plantation).
To be accurate, Boone is a plantation on which the substantial brick
Sites of Slavery 195

slave quarters are prominently featured, whereas other plantations tend


to erase the presence of black life altogether. But even if the quarters are
extant, they are not part of the official guided tour. So-called Slave Street
can be discovered only on a self-guided tour, but even then, its eight cabins,
a selection of which are shown in figure 93, are identified as exhibition
spaces presenting different themes in telling the black history story,
rather than as actual slave accommodations (Boone Hall Plantation 2011).

Figure 93. Boone Hall Plantation, Row of Slave Cabins. Photograph Julia
Faisst.

Adjacent to the big house, the cabins are represented as mere appendages
to the dwellings of the white people, designed to complement the orderly,
aesthetic appeal of the masters house (Mooney 2004, 59). Segregation,
both of the architecture and the ways in which it is presented, is, as Barbara
Burlison Mooney puts it, fully at work in this interpretive division
(Mooney 2004, 52). What remains entirely unaddressed is the exploitative
labour that underlies the ornamental refinement of the white architecture.
As can be seen in figure 93, Boone Halls slave cabins have been
prettified, giving the impression that slave housing was, architecturally
speaking, well-kept and attractive. The quaint bench under the shady tree
adds to the sense that this is an environment marked by tranquillity. In fact,
this type of slave housing has always been the exception, not least because
it was built for only a minuscule number of slaves, namely those who
196 Faisst

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

References

Adams, Jessica. 2007. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property


on the Postslavery Plantation. Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press.
Babb, Valerie. 2011. E Pluribus Unum? The American Origins Narrative
in Toni Morrisons A Mercy. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
U.S. 36 (2): 147164.
Best, Stephen. 2004. The Fugitives Properties: Law and the Poetics of
Possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boone Hall Plantation. 2011. http://boonehallplantation.com. Accessed 10
August.
Boone Hall Plantation. 2011. The Perfect Moment The Perfect
Place Boone Hall Plantation. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=iK4AOyaeLys. Accessed 10 August 2011.
Chandler, Marilyn. 1991. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Douglass, Frederick. 1994. Autobiographies. New York: Library of
America.
Ellis, Clifton and Gina Haney. 2007. Visual Culture and Ideology: The
Gothic Revival in the Backlot of Antebellum Charleston. Southern
Quarterly 44 (4): 940.
Faulkner, William. 1990. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Vintage.
hooks, bell. 1990. Homeplace: A Site of Resistance. In Yearning: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Politics, 4149. Boston: South End Press.
Sites of Slavery 197

Jacobs, Harriet. 2000. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York:
Signet.
Jennings, La Vinia Delois. 2009. A Mercy: Toni Morrison Plots the
Formation of Racial Slavery in Seventeenth-Century America.
Callaloo 32 (2): 645703.
Johnson, Charles. 1995. Oxherding Tale. New York: Scribner.
Kawash, Samira. 2001. Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships: Race,
Architecture, and Identity in Beloved and Middle Passage. CR: The
New Centennial Review 1 (3): 6786.
Klee, Jeffrey E. 2007. Letter From America: Service Space in Savannah.
Vernacular Architecture 38: 7074.
McPherson, Tara. 2003. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia
in the Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Montgomery, Maxine L. 2011. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Migration,
Exile, and Home in Toni Morrisons A Mercy. Journal of Black Studies
42 (4): 62737.
Mooney, Barbara Burlison. 2004. Looking for Historys Huts. Winterthur
Portfolio 39 (1): 4368.
Morrison, Toni. 2008a. A Mercy. New York: Vintage.
. 2008b. Toni Morrison Discusses A Mercy. Interview with Lynn
Neary. NPR.org. NPR, 27 October 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/
story/story.php?storyld=95961382.
Pogue, Dennis J. 2002. The Domestic Architecture of Slavery at George
Washingtons Mount Vernon. Winterthur Portfolio 37 (1): 322.
Reed, Ishmael. 1976. Flight to Canada. New York: Scribner.
Ruzicka, William T. 1987. Faulkners Fictive Architecture: The Meaning
of Place in the Yoknapatawpha Novels. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press.
Sundquist, Eric J. 1985. Faulkner: A House Divided. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Vlach, John Michael. 1993. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of
Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press.
Wright, Gwendolyn. 1981. The Big House and the Slave Quarters.
Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 4157.
New York: Pantheon Books.
The Cranbrook Map:
Locating Meanings in Textile Art

Leena Svinhufvud

The Cranbrook Map is a wall hanging representing a map of the site that is
now the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills near the
city of Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. The map was hand-woven in
1935 at Studio Loja Saarinen, the weaving studio of the Finnish-born artist
Loja Saarinen (18791968). This large wall hanging, which measures over
nine square metres (300 x 330 cm), carries on the tradition of European
tapestries, representative pictorial wall hangings symbolising the power of
a court or a merchants wealth. The textile is preserved in the collection of
the Cranbrook Art Museum.1
Cranbrook was founded and built during the first half of the twentieth
century by the wealthy newspaper publisher George Gough Booth (1864
1949) and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth (18631948). George Booth was
a founding member of the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society in 1906. By the
early 1920s, the Booths were amongst the principal patrons of the American
Arts and Crafts movement, commissioning tapestries, furniture, metal
and glass works and other decorative items from American and European
workshops (Pound 1964; Taragin 1983).
In 1922 Eliel Saarinen (18731950), then fifty years old and already
a recognised architect in Europe, won the second prize in an international
competition organised by the Chicago Tribune. While visiting the United
States on this occasion, he was invited to teach at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor. On meeting George Booth there, Saarinen was invited to
develop a plan for an art academy in Cranbrook. He was appointed resident

1
This article is part of my postdoctoral research project on hand weaving in modern
art and design in the first half of the twentieth century, with Loja Saarinen as my
central case study. The idea for this article developed during my research trips to
Cranbrook in December 2010 and September 2011. I wish to thank the staff of the
Cranbrook Archives and the Cranbrook Art Museum for their knowledgeable help
and inspiring exchange of ideas. My thanks especially to the Head Archivist, Leslie
S. Edwards, and Gregory Wittkopp, the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum.
200 Svinhufvud

architect, and when the Cranbrook Academy of Art was founded in 1932,
Saarinen became its first president. The Saarinen family lived and worked
in Cranbrook from 1925. Saarinens wife Loja founded her weaving studio
there in 1928 and was the head of the Weaving Department from 1932 to
1942, when her studio closed (Thurman 1983; Gerard 1980). The couples
son Eero Saarinen (191061) started his career there as architect, and their
daughter, Pipsan (Eva-Liisa) Saarinen Swanson (190579), began her
career as an interior designer.2
My art history research project addresses the economic systems and
gendered settings that framed modern textile art in the early twentieth
century. I want to challenge the traditional hierarchies of the built
environment, which are formed in the systems of production. In this article
I will locate meanings of textile art in the Cranbrook art community using
a piece of textile art as a platform or map. I will question the kind of
document a textile represents in the project studied here. The textile known
as the Cranbrook Map was created in the critical years of the Cranbrook
Academy of Art, at a time when the new institution became a reality and
right after the years of the deepest economic depression. I read this textile
as a symbol of ownership by the Cranbrook project at one of its peak
moments. Also the problematic place of the woman designer and artist
who participated in this project may be examined through an historical
investigation of this textile.

Reading the Cranbrook Map

For someone who does not know the motif of the Cranbrook Map it may
appear to be an abstract work in the sense of being a non-representational
or decorative wall hanging (figure 101). The hanging is framed by a
stepped border ornament reminiscent of traditional decorative weaves. As
a map, however, this textile is an abstraction of the geography and the built
environment of Cranbrook.

2
On Saarinen family, especially Eliel and Eero Saarinen, see Westbrook and
Yarowsky 1983; Hausen et al. 1990; Pelkonen and Albrecht 2006; Tuomi 2007.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 201

Figure 101. The Cranbrook Map, 1935 (CAM 1935.7). Designed by Eliel
Saarinen. Woven at Studio Loja Saarinen, work attributed to Lillian Holm
and Ruth Ingvarson. Copyright Cranbrook Archives.

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

later known as Saarinen House and Milles House. Adjoining to the north
are the sculpture studios, and finally, around a rectangular courtyard are the
other buildings that make up the Academy of Art.
While Eliel Saarinens architecture forms the principal structure for this
map, the sculptures of Carl Milles (18751955) also feature prominently.
Recommended to Booth by Saarinen, the Swedish artist was invited to be
Cranbooks resident sculptor and moved to Michigan with his Austrian
wife Olga in 1931 (Marter 1983, 24552). One of Milless first works at
Cranbrook was the fountain Jonah (1932), which decorates the end of the
main vertical axis at the top centre of the hanging. Triton figures surround
an artificial stepped pool, which creates the second vertical axis from the
Lone Pine Road gate to the courtyard of the museum and library. In 1935
Milles finished a replica of Europa and the Bull in his Cranbrook studio
the original is from 1926; on the map it is located in the courtyard of the
museum building in the middle of the hanging.
In the genre of maps, the composition respects the points of the
compass, and some of its elements have been reduced to symbols. The
water in the artificial lakes and the river is depicted with a blue and white
zigzag pattern. The simplified green treetops and lines indicating the
hedges are also distinct. The colour of the buildings and sculptures is based
on the actual colours: red brick roofs for the Cranbrook School, green
copper or slate roofs for the Academy buildings, green for the patinated
bronze sculptures. However, the overall colouring of the ground is light
grey and brown, which does not reflect the verdant Cranbrook landscape,
but does provide a useful background for the architecture. Compared with
a geographic map, this representation is not accurate. The distances and
scales do not correspond to the measurable landscape, nor do the positions
of some of the constructions. For example, the huge Kingswood Girls
School complex, which in reality almost exceeds the entire Academy of Art
campus in size and lies further northeast, is squeezed into one corner of the
textile.
Looking at the hanging as a map, one is struck by the variation in
depicting the buildings. The two schools are shown in plan format: the
Cranbrook School on the left of Academy Way and the Kingswood Girls
School at the top right corner by the swan lake, both distinguished merely as
orange (or brick-coloured) rectangular shapes. By contrast, the Cranbrook
Institute of Science at the top centre is shown in elevation. Furthermore,
the faade has been marked with stars, and there are two observer figures
indicating the function of this building (on the interpretation of these
figures, see Gerard 1982). Finally, the buildings in the middle of the textile
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 203

are depicted through a flattened perspective. These are the Academy


buildings that already existed together with a considerable number of new
structures growing towards the north and east on the map. Some of the
buildings were still being planned and some were never realised. (Compare
the site map in Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983, 53 and 351, as well as
Eckert 2001.) The intrusive three dimensionality of these constructions is
further highlighted by their central position in the composition. In modern
woven textiles stylisation is often expected, but here the variation in the
presentation seems to contain a message.
It thus seems that topicality is the key to understanding the variation of
architectural representation here. World economic depression caused a halt
to construction activities at Cranbrook. In 1935 Saarinen was negotiating
with George Booth on a plan for a museum and a library, studio buildings
and other facilities to complete the Academy of Art complex; i.e. the
complex highlighted in the hanging. Outdoor sculptures were also topical.
In the same year, all 66 pieces by Milles were acquired to decorate the
Cranbrook premises. As president of the Art Academy at the time, Eliel
Saarinen said of the acquisition: It will make Cranbrook one of the great
beauty spots in this country and will add greatly to its importance as an art
center (Baulch 1999). Thus, rather than a map, this hanging represents a
layout of Eliel Saarinens total plan. Cranbrook Layout was, in fact, the
textiles original title (Gerard 1982). Moreover, my reading suggests an
active role for the modern woven hanging at the time the development of
Cranbrook was being negotiated.
There are two other buildings that stand out by their elevated depiction.
One is the above-mentioned Institute of Science. It was originally designed
by George Booth, and around 1935 it was being redesigned by Saarinen.
(De Long 1983, 65n69.) Also shown in elevation is a temple-like building
at the bottom right corner of the textile. It is the Cranbrook Pavilion
designed by Albert Kahn in 1924, a large hall with columns, which was
used for theatre performances. The Pavilion was built beside the so-
called Greek Temple, where arts and crafts pageantries were performed
outdoors. In the early 1930s the Pavilion was renovated to provide a
lecture and performance space and exhibition hall (Taragin 1983, 3839).
On its roof is a setting that, according to John Gerard, shows the subtle
humour of Eliel Saarinen (Gerard 1982). A male figure on the left carrying
a painters palette presents a miniature house for a penguin-like creature on
the right and wearing black boots. Amongst the variety of interpretations,
the representation of the architect Saarinen and the patron Booth seems
incontestable (see also VanderBeke Mager 2004; Thurman 1983, 187).
204 Svinhufvud

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

The Cranbrook Vision

When it was finished in May 1935, the Cranbrook Map was placed in the
very Pavilion depicted in the textilewith Eliel Saarinen and George Booth
at the top. The hanging was first displayed there as part of the Exhibition of
Home Furnishings. Among a broad array of interior textiles produced by
Studio Loja Saarinen, the hanging was presented in a special way, flanked by
stepped, flared columns (figure 102). This telescope motif was the main
pattern used throughout the Kingswood school and was seen on chimneys,
leaded windows and rugs (De Long 1983, 59, 61; Thurman 1983, 188189
and image 153).3 Judging from the surviving black and white photographs,
the columns were constructed of plants or other organic material. Standing
beside the flat hanging, the living columns with their identifiable
architectural reference emphasise the realistic content of the abstract textile:
this is a map consisting of buildings, sculpture and landscape.

3
I want to thank Leslie S. Edwards for pointing out the Kingswood columns in a
photograph.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 205

Figure 102. Exhibition of Home Furnishings in the Cranbrook Pavilion in


May 1935. Copyright Cranbrook Archives. Photograph Richard G. Askew
(CEC 2761).

It was George Booth himself who purchased the tapestry for the Cranbrook
Pavilion.4 In the previous section I illustrated the Cranbrook Map hanging
as a tool in negotiation. Besides showing a commitment to the Arts and
Crafts tradition, the votive image reveals the symbiotic relationship
between patron and architect. The ceremony between two men woven
into this map brings to mind another theatrical scene: the ceremony at the
University of Michigan in which Eliel Saarinen was formally introduced
into the community of American architects and in whichGeorge Booth also
played a role. In December of 1923 a welcoming celebration was arranged
in Ann Arbor, consisting of an exhibition of Professor Saarinens work,
a Pageant of Arts and Crafts organised by George Booths son Henry
(Harry) Scripps Booth (18971988) and a dinner with Booth pre as one of
4
According to Leslie S. Edwards, George Booth then donated the textile to the
Cranbrook Foundation; it was later transferred into the Art Museums collection.
The hanging with Kingswood columns was moved to a permanent installation
on the end wall of the Pavilion some time after the exhibition. Already in 1936
the Cranbrook Pavilion was turned over to the theatre group of Henry S. Booth,
St Dunstans Guild, and the hanging was used to decorate the dining hall of the
Cranbrook School. It is not quite clear when the textile was moved from there.
Possibly this took place in 1942 when the new art museum and library were opened.
E-mail communication from Leslie S. Edwards to the writer, 2 March 2011.
206 Svinhufvud

the speakers. A narration of this event describes the stately reception given
for the Finnish architect:
There the noted Finn was honored by an arts-and-crafts pageant put on by
ninety students before an audience of Michigan architects from all parts
of the state, with Harry Booth as author, director and principal actor. The
reader will recall the old Cranbrook habit of staging plays and pageants at
Cranbrook. On this occasion at Ann Arbor, father George Booth was chief
speaker to members of the American Institute and Michigan Society of
Architects, and discussed with the guest of honor a program to accelerate
expansion at Cranbrook. This contact gave prompt direction and zest to
the hitherto leisurely thoughts of George and Ellen Booth on Cranbrook
developments.5 (Pound 1964, 277, 3056)

Henry S. Booth and Saarinens future son-in-law, J. Robert F. Swanson


(190081), were then studying architecture in Ann Arbor under Eliel
Saarinen. The mediating role of the family members in creating the
connection between Saarinen and Cranbrook is brought out in the
biographies of Booth and Saarinen (Pound 1964; Christ-Janer 1948; Tuomi
2007, 11314). However, as the Saarinen scholar Gregory Wittkopp has
shown, George Booth had already learned about Eliel Saarinen in April
of 1923 from Emil Lorch, the director of the Department of Architecture
at the University of Michigan (see the discussion on claiming the credit
for the introduction in Wittkopp 1994, 2324). The following year, while
committed to a development project on the Detroit River Front sponsored
by George Booth, Eliel Saarinen started to work on the idea of an academy
of art in Cranbrook. Saarinen worked on the plan intensively while living in
Ann Arbor, and in October of 1924, the first master plan for the Cranbrook
Academy of Art was ready.6
At this stage Henry Booth and J. Robert F. Swanson, having now
graduated as architects, were responsible for the construction of the first
completed buildings for the educational community under the tutelage of
Saarinen. The Saarinen family moved to Cranbrook in the fall of 1925, and
Eliel Saarinen started his work there now tutoring his former students Henry
Booth and J. Robert F. Swanson in building the Cranbrook Architectural
Office. The office opened in June of 1926, and the next year Saarinen was
officially appointed chief architectural officer. Other projects followed,

5
There is a printed program of this event in Saarinen Family Papers, Box 1:13.
6
On Eliel Saarinens first projects in America see De Long 1983, 50, 52; Pound
1964, 306, 402; Christ-Janer 1948, 135; Details of Saarinens projects were also
published in Finnish newspapers; see for example Standertskjld 2010, 30.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 207

including a school for boys (the Cranbrook School, 192729), residences


and craft studios (the Arts and Crafts Buildings, 192829), Residences #1
and #2 for the resident architect and resident sculptor (Saarinen House and
Milles House, 192830), a school for girls (the Kingswood Girls School,
192932), the Cranbrook Academy of Art (193038), the Cranbrook
Institute of Science (193538), and the Museum and Library building for
the Academy of Art (193842). (Wittkopp 1994, 2426; Westbrook and
Yarowsky 1983, 351.)
While the existing institutions and buildings in Cranbrook testify to the
collaboration between George Booth and Eliel Saarinen, the initial phase
remains somewhat unclear. J. Robert F. Swanson recalled that Booth and
Saarinen started to work together intensively in the fall of 1926 (Wittkopp
1994, 25). However, the first two master plans had already been drafted
in Ann Arbor. There is an unpublished manuscript on the Academy of Art
project by Eliel Saarinen, dated 1925 and thus probably written in Ann
Arbor. (Saarinen 1925) I suggest that this manuscript was, in fact, part
of Saarinens initial plan submitted to George Booth.7 A scale model was
made, based on Saarinens master plan from 1925. It was crafted by Loja
Saarinen and presented to Booth in May of 1925 (De Long 1983, 52, 54
and n30).
George Booths idealism is often emphasised: his religious background,
his social and educational aims and his commitment to art reform (Harris
1983). Indeed, the media first presented Cranbrook to the public as a
philanthropic educational project. This was demonstrated for example in
newspaper articles published in 1928 with titles The Cranbrook Foundation
to Help Youth Develop its Talents and Publisher Dedicates Fortune to
Make Youth better Citizens (Scrapbook Collection, 192732).8 Perspective
drawings by Eliel Saarinen and publicity photos taken of the scale model
illustrated newspaper articles. Over the following decades the Finnish
architect and his family played an important role in articles and news about

7
The original typescript written in English is preserved at the library of the
Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki. It is part of the material donated by
Loja Saarinen in 1952 to the Finnish Association of Architects. On the first page is a
pencil marking in Loja Saarinens handwriting: BY ELIEL SAARINEN. 1925. In
a letter to Johannes hquist dated 12 March 1926 she mentions that Eliel is writing
about architectural pedagogy for the Academys brochure (Collection Johannes
hquist). Timo Tuomi refers to a contemporary newspaper article, which tells about
Eliel Saarinen working on a book (Tuomi 2007, 114 and n118).
8
These articles were published in Washington Post, 24 January 1928 and in The
Detroit News, 8 January 1928.
208 Svinhufvud

Cranbrook. As a newspaper man, Booth understood the power of publicity,


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

Textile Art at Cranbrook

Cranbrook is part of the history of modern textile art. In hindsight, it seems


obvious that training in weaving would be established at the Cranbrook
Academy of Art and that interior textiles for the Cranbrook buildings

9
Samuel Marquis was the Rector of Christ Church Cranbrook. I want to thank
Leslie S. Edwards for apprising me of this valuable source of the Rectors papers.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 209

would be produced locally. However, given the scale and complexity of the
project, this question needs to be reassessed.
According to his biography, George Booths vision of his Academy
of Art embraced the unity of the arts under the umbrella of architecture:
Architecture not only employs other arts; it houses them. If an inclusive
art is sometime to verge on perfection, all of its contributory arts must
be equally developed (Quoted in Pound 1964, 380). For Eliel Saarinen
too, architecture was the all-embracing mother-art (Saarinen 1925,
[Ch.] XXII: 3). In his unpublished manuscript from around 1925 Saarinen
elaborates on his idea of a modern art academy (see also Tuomi 2007,
11423; Chudoba 2011, 7072, 12831). Opposed to traditional academic
art education, Saarinen identified the medieval workshop with its masters
and apprentices as the ideal training ground: The building site itself and
the stone-yard previously directed the executing of the structure. Today,
the architects office directs the works (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XXVI, The
Architectural Office). As there would be a great deal of work for painters,
sculptors and craftsmen at Cranbrook, workshops and studios attached to
the architectural office were expected to spring up. In Saarinens plan the
Academy of Art was to be divided into five departments: Architecture,
Sculpture, Painting, Artcraft and Landscape Gardening. The Artcraft
department included work in metal, wood, glass, ceramics and textiles.
Its educational scope would include all art forms directly connected to
architecture, from sculpture in stone and wood and mural painting to pure
painting and sculpture, and especially all the artcraft in different materials,
beginning with metalwork and ending with textiles, which has its practical
application in home-furnishing etc (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XXVIII, The
Arts Allied to Architecture in connection with the Activity of the Office).
Thus, textilesthough not specifically weavingwere part of Saarinens
initial plan, whereas some other arts initially suggested in the plan were
not included in the Academy of Art curriculum (regarding the landscape
architecture, see Balmori 1994).
There is a much-repeated story about the founding of Studio Loja
Saarinen based on an interview with the artist in a contemporary newspaper
article. According to this account, George Booth had proposed that she
design textiles for Eliel Saarinens buildings in Cranbrook and suggested
that they could be manufactured in Finland. Loja Saarinens response
was, why not weave them in Cranbrook? (Thurman 1983, 175) This story
emphasises her initiative as an artist. George Booth was well aware of
contemporary European textile art through his travels and his activities with
the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. He also had considerable knowledge
210 Svinhufvud

of textile history as a collector (Thurman 1983, 17375; on the Society,


see Colby 1956). His collections included European tapestries, and, as an
admirer of William Morris, in the 1920s Booth supported the continuation
of Morriss tapestry workshop in Merton Abbey, Surrey, in the UK (Parry
1983). As the textile historian Christa C. Mayer Thurman has pointed
out, Booth even wanted to hire English tapestry weavers at Cranbrook
(Thurman 1983, 173). Although Booth did not include textiles in his initial
plan for the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Clark 1983, 29), his concern with
the place of textiles in the practice of Arts and Crafts was very serious, as
Thurman (ibid., 174) asserts.
The place and status of textile art in Cranbrook can be observed in
the physical environment. Spatial practices reflect the hierarchies and
dynamics of society, and built space can be observed as a network of power
(see e.g. Saarikangas 2010). The spaces reserved for textile production
can be studied in photographs, architectural drawings and other archival
documents, as well as by exploring the existing physical site. Studio Loja
Saarinen was established in the brand-new Arts and Crafts Building, which
lies at the main entrance to Cranbrook from Academy Road, one building
away from the Saarinen residence and next to the Art Club building, where
some of Loja Saarinens staff resided. Although there are no annotations
in the original drawings on the planned use of the building, from the very
beginning the premises were used by the weaving studio.
The studio had its own entrance right next to the gate to Cranbrook.
The main space is a large vaulted hall, clearly visible from the exterior of
the building. Large looms for weaving rugs were placed in the basement.
The first-floor studio accommodated working space for looms and, by the
gable window, a reception space with a table and benches. A photograph
from ca. 1930 shows that the first floor of the studio was beautifully
furnished (figure 103). The furniture and textiles were mainly from the
Cranbrook studios. The decorative paintings in the wooden ceiling were
by the Detroit artist and craftswoman Katherine McEwen (18751945), a
founding member of the Detroit Society for Arts and Crafts whom George
Booth had commissioned to create mural paintings for Cranbrook. Here
the visual programme relates to textile production, which indicates the
original purpose of these premises (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box
19: Cranbrook Academy of Arts Craft Shops Inventory; cf. Eckert 2001,
105; today, this impressive first-floor studio is used by one of Cranbrooks
resident artists). Clearly, this space also had a representational function,
and for this, we turn our attention to the public character of the workshop.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 211

Figure 103. Interior of Studio Loja Saarinen ca. 1929. Copyright


Cranbrook Archives (CEC 1424).

Studio Loja Saarinen was not a closed workshop for production, but rather
a commercial studio. In fact, all the arts and crafts studios at Cranbrook
worked the same way. The original function of the craft studios was
to produce artwork for the Cranbrook premises and sell their products
outside, to private clients and to other architectural projects (Thurman
1983, 18992; Wittkopp 1995, 31).10 Loja Saarinen was one of the resident
craftspeople at Cranbrook and the only woman in this position. Her studio
got off to a flying start, thanks to large commissions for Cranbrook, but
there were also other clients, one of the most notable being the perfumer
and businessman Richard Hudnut and his stylish Fifth Avenue showroom in
New York which Loja Saarinen mentions in her letter to Johannes hquist
dated 8 June 1930 (Collection Johannes hquist; on Richard Hudnuts
commission see Miller 1983, 1012). In 1933, when the Great Depression
was forcing the closing of other crafts studios, the weaving studio remained
open. It is interesting that considerable effort was now put in to promoting
Loja Saarinens Studio. An elegantly furnished showroommy new,
beautiful atelier, as Loja described it in a letterwas opened in another
Cranbrook building, separate from the weaving activities. In December of

10
On the commercial function of Cranbrook workshops, see also Taragin 1983,
4042 and Marter 1983, 239.
212 Svinhufvud

1933 Loja Saarinen held a joint exhibition with her daughter Pipsan. Four
hundred people were invited to the opening, which featured a fashion show
of Pipsans designs. Lojas atelier was also kept open, but sales were
poor, as Loja Saarinen commented in another letter, dated 17 December
1933 (Collection Johannes hquist).
Studio Loja Saarinen thus appealed to clients from outside the
Cranbrook art community. A brochure of Studio Loja Saarinen, printed
around 1932 advertised Handwoven Art Fabrics, Rugs and Window
Hangings, Special Commissions Only. All work undertaken from original
designs and of selected materials. The rugs and curtains produced stress
the suitability of design and color for the place with exceptional durability
(Saarinen Family Papers, Box 4:9). The leaflet printed for the Exhibition
of Home Furnishings in 1935 also stated that the objects were for sale and
special orders will be executed (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box
26:20). Perhaps the craft-based production of interior textiles was expected
to thrive during times that were difficult for industries (see my discussion
on the depression and the craft-based industries in Finland in Svinhufvud
2009). Although no great economic success, the weaving studio survived.
In any case Studio Loja Saarinen realised the vision of Eliel Saarinen and
George Booth for crafts workshops as commercial enterprises.
The exhibition of 1935 showing the Cranbrook Map and the group
arrangements by Eliel Saarinen, Loja Saarinen, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson
and J. Robert F. Swanson is interesting from yet another perspective. It was
a Saarinen family exhibition (Christ-Janer 1948, 110, 129). According
to the printed brochure there were two interiors: A Room for a Lady,
designed for the 1935 Industrial Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and a living room ensemble designed by the Saarinen
Swanson couple. The rest of the exhibition consisted of Formal and
Informal Table Arrangements designed by Loja Saarinen and woven on
the Cranbrook Looms and finally, Tapestries Runners Rugs Handbags by
Loja Saarinen (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box 26:20). It is puzzling
that Studio Loja Saarinen is not named as the manufacturer of the textiles
here (although it was) and that some of the woven items are identified
as by Loja Saarineni.e. the design was not markedly differentiated
from the execution. By contrast, a gown from the Room for a Lady
arrangement was, according to the text, designed and executed by Pipsan
Saarinen Swanson. The ambiguous expression in this document raises
questions about the roles of Loja Saarinen, which for the time being remain
unanswered.
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 213

The Imaginary Weaver

On the cover of the brochure for Studio Loja Saarinen is a drawing of


a woman weaving at a loom (figure 104). Is this a portrait of Loja
Saarinen, a document of the artist at work? It was, after all, to Loja Saarinen
that George Booth paid $355.30 for a Tapestry for Pavilion (Invoice from
Loja Saarinen to George Booth, 22 May 1935, Saarinen Family Papers
3:15). There was a tag attached to the hanging with the text: Tapestry 10 x
11, value $375. Cranbrook Layout. Design: Eliel Saarinen. Studio of Loja
Saarinen, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (Cranbrook Art Museum, Object
files: Cranbrook Map (CAM 1935.7). The design, or in other words the
picture in the textile, is here attributed to Eliel Saarinen.

Figure 104. The Studio Loja Saarinen, cover of a printed brochure dated
in 1932. Copyright Cranbrook Archives, Saarinen Family Papers (1990-08).

In Finland Loja Saarinen, who was educated as a sculptor, assisted her


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

given the master-apprentice ideal expressed in Eliel Saarinens visions for


the academy mentioned above. In fact, Loja Saarinens identity as a weaver
is quite problematic.
In the literature on Eliel Saarinen, his wife Loja has been described as
specialising in textile craft. As the landscape designer and historian Diana
Balmori has stated, this traditional womens work has provided a suitable
compartment for Loja vis--vis her husbands oeuvre (Balmori 1994). The
wife of the architect was remembered as a maker of textiles and even as a
weaver. Relatives have recalled that in the 1910s, Loja was weaving on the
loom at Hvittrsk (Thurman 1983, 176). She was assumed to have woven
the large bench rug called a ryijy, which Eliel designed for their home, until
the work was attributed to a professional weaving studio in Helsinki called
Friends of Finnish Handicraft (Finnish: Suomen Ksityn Ystvt; Saarinen
in Finland 1984, 24, caption 1; cf. Amberg 1987, 93). According to her
own statement, given in a Finnish newspaper interview, Loja Saarinen took
a short course in weaving in Helsinki in order to start her own studio in
America (Kuoppamki 1932). This statement is supported by a Cranbrook
memoir, which states that Loja Saarinen perfected her skill in weaving
at Cranbrook (Thurman 1983, 187n62). Loja Saarinen thus knew how to
weave, but she had not specialised as a weaver.
It is highly unlikely that Loja Saarinen participated in weaving the
Cranbrook Map, although she may have contributed to the process as she
did with other hangings (Thurman 1983, 192). In her studio she had other
experts carrying out the practical work. Loja Saarinen reports in a letter
dated 4 November 1928, that to start production, she had hired a Swedish
immigrant woman from Chicago as a weaver (Collection Johannes
hquist). In 1929 Maja Andersson Wirde (18731952), a textile artist in the
Swedish Association for Textile Art (Handarbetets Vnner) in Stockholm,
was invited to give instruction in weaving at the Academy of Art (Thurman
1983, 18188). According to the Annual Reports of the Association Wirde
was a recognised expert in woven textiles who also had experience as a
teacher (rsberttelse fr Freningen Handarbetets Vnner, 190729).
She worked for Studio Loja Saarinen as a designer and technical expert,
and her fee was actually paid jointly by Loja Saarinen and the Cranbrook
Foundation. In the studio Wirde supervised the weavers, many of whom
were of Swedish-immigrant origin. The Cranbrook Map may have been
woven by two weavers who came to Cranbrook with Wirde and who
received further training in Sweden around this time, Lillian Holm (1896
1979) and Ruth Ingvarson (18971969) (Thurman 1983, 18788). Thus, a
hierarchy existed in the weaving studio (see my discussion on hierarchy in
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 215

the studio of the Friends of Finnish Handicraft in the 1920s and 1930s in
Svinhufvud 2009).
In the case of the Cranbrook Map, most of the production costs came
from weaving and mounting, the work of craftswomen. According to the
contract between Loja Saarinen and the Cranbrook Foundation, Saarinen
received a 10 per cent supplement on the actual production costs for design
and supervision. Regarding the attribution of the design (the picture), we
have to rely on the information written on the tag because no sketches
survive. In her personal letters dated 3 March 1930 and 9 September 1932
Loja Saarinen wrote that she realised (her word in Swedish is utarbeta)
Eliels designs for textiles (Collection Johannes hquist). Lacking
comprehensive documentation, knowledge about her work as a designer
is limited and contradictory. However, some documents do remain to tell
about her communication with clients and how she took charge of financial
matters. They in fact reveal her considerable organisational skills. Loja
Saarinen was the manager of her weaving studio and also the person in
the Saarinen artist family who kept the strings in the house. This was the
description given by the Saarinen familys maid, Anna Danielson, who also
worked as a weaver for Loja Saarinen (Balmori 1995, 152).
The identity of a designer-organiser fits the profile of an entrepreneur.
Indeed, the idea of entrepreneurship shifts the focus from the artists
individual creativity to the collective processes of design, networks and
production systems. Other scholars have shown examples of European
and American women artists who made their careers and earned their
livelihoods in their own studios on the basis of traditional hand weaving.
Textile historians Mary Schoeser and Whitney Blausen have labeled textile
design as well-paying self-support. They cite as examples the successful
businesses of Loja Saarinens contemporaries Maria Kipp (190088) and
Dorothy Liebes (18971972), who as studio owners organised the work of
craftspeople and sometimes employed other artists as designers. (Schoeser
and Blausen 2000; see also Musicant 2000, Winton 2009 and Boydell
1995.) Schoeser and Blausen point out that in the studios of well-known
artist-designers, the so-called in-house designers remained relatively
anonymous. Brand recognition and the name of the studiothe name of
the central figurebecame important when competition was fierce. Thus,
while the logic of producing textiles in a modern weaving studio followed
corporate strategies and the logic of industry, the modernist myth of a
singular artist genius was still useful to mark the ownership of the products.
(See the discussion of the designers for the Finnish Artek design company
in Suominen-Kokkonen 1997.)
216 Svinhufvud

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

Textile and Scale Model as Imagined Architecture

In historical records such as the exhibition catalogue quoted above, the


Cranbrook Map is consistently called a tapestry. However, the technique
of this hanging is quite different from that of a tapestry. It was woven with
a plain weave with discontinuous wefts, a technique connected to Swedish
textile art. This was a signature technique of the Swedish Association
for Textile Art, also called HV-teknik, which was developed to produce
modern decorative interior textiles (Thurman 1983, 177; see also, for
example, Handarbetets Vnner 1907, 45, 8). At Cranbrook the technique
was developed for transparent curtains and decorative wall hangings.
There, skilful weaving resulted in astonishingly detailed forms, such as the
recognisable sculptures in the Cranbrook Map. There was indeed a great
deal of work in the technical execution, while the design process demanded
a great deal of specialist attention as well. The figures are based on
geometric stylisation. Imitating routes and paths, the background is divided
into rectangular forms, and although this is an aesthetic solution, it is also
relevant technically, balancing the structure of the delicate, translucent
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 217

fabric. The weavers needed a 1:1 scale pattern drawing for their work.
The yarns also had to be selected before the actual weaving process. Yarns
of varying materials and colours were mixed to create a lively surface;
on close observation the texture, woven with linen, wool and rayon, is
extremely variegated. There is, however, little improvisation in the actual
weaving where the contours of figures have to be followed carefully.
Two other large hangings were woven at Studio Loja Saarinen using
this technique: The Festival of the May Queen (1932) for the Kingswood
Girls School at Cranbrook and The Sermon on the Mount (1941) created
for the First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. Compared with the
other hangings, the untapestry-like motif (a map) and the references to
architectural representation techniques make the Cranbrook Map special.
Christa C. Mayer Thurman cites the Cranbrook Map as a prime example
of Eliel Saarinens use of architectural motifs as his central design concept
in textiles (Thurman 1983, 187, 181183; see also Elliott 2008). With its
variety of presentation methodsplan, elevation and aerial perspective
the hanging can also be interpreted as a visualisation of architectural
design techniques. In fact, the Cranbrook Map materialises the idea of
perspectival or three-dimensional understanding of architecture articulated
in Eliel Saarinens manuscript of 1925: A building never in reality appears
as shown on the drawing or as it is measured and erected, but it is always
a perspectivic [sic] apparition with the relation of masses and proportions
perspectivically [sic] foreshortened (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XIV, The
Development of Three Dimensional Imagination). Saarinen argues that
perspectivic feeling should be applied to the design process and that most
of the designing should be done using perspective drawings and three-
dimensional models. This ideal was applied to the training of architects at
Cranbrook by using three-dimensional models.
As a joint project of Eliel and Loja Saarinen, the Cranbrook Map is
reminiscent of another form of craft that connected their creative work:
architectural scale models. Eliel Saarinen used scale models in his
architectural projects. They were key elements in large town planning
projects in which he demonstrated his skills in performing architecture.
For the city development project of Munkkiniemi-Haaga in Helsinki,
executed between 1910 and 1915, it was Loja Saarinen who crafted the
scale model. The Munkkiniemi-Haaga model, measuring more than 5
metres by 2.5 metres and preserved in the collections of the Helsinki City
Museum, bears witness to the Saarinens commitment to this massive
project. In 1915 the model was presented in an exhibition in Helsinki
displaying this ambitious development project sponsored by Helsinki
218 Svinhufvud

businessmen (Mikkola 1990, 202211). Photographs of the model were


used to illustrate the project publication, including scientific articles and
detailed city plans in colour (Saarinen 1915).
As mentioned above, a scale model was also included in Eliel Saarinens
first plan for Cranbrook. According to a letter dated 26 December 1926,
Loja Saarinen worked six hours a day in Eliels office starting at the end
of 1926, possibly continuing with the original model or making new ones
(Collection Johannes hquist). In 1928 she was receiving a dollar an hour
from the Cranbrook Foundation for making models. (Balmori 1994, 55).
The photographs of the impressive Cranbrook model (figure 105) were
used extensively in publicity when George Booth launched the Cranbrook
project in 1928. (Scrapbook Collection 192732). A model of the
Kingswood Girls School, also made by Loja Saarinen, was similarly used.
In fact, photos of scale models were a very effective medium for presenting
architectural plans. Published in newspapers, the carefully illuminated
and cropped, close-up images of the model resemble aerial photography,
a popular documentary genre of the time. The perspectivicality shown in
these staged photos is strongly reminiscent of Eliel Saarinens most skilful
architectural drawings of the site (Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983, 34; on
representations of modern textiles in photographs, see Svinhufvud 2010).

Figure 105. Photograph of the scale model of Cranbrook taken in 1928 for
publicity purposes. The model was made by Loja Saarinen ca. 1925 after
Eliel Saarinens original plan drawings. Copyright Cranbrook Archives.
Photograph Harvey Croze (FD227).
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 219

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

Conclusion

In conjunction with a large international exhibition in 198384, the


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

It is also a document of Eliel Saarinens oeuvre at Cranbrook and the total


architectural plan, including Carl Milless sculptures. George Booth is also
portrayed as the patron of Cranbrook and the person who commissioned
this textile. Loja Saarinen, however, does not figure on this map unless one
is aware of its production history.
This essay deals with the age-old question of attribution: who gets
the credit? The Cranbrook Vision project celebrated Eliel Saarinen as the
central figure in Cranbrooks history. The task that Saarinen took upon
himself was enormous, and the results are spectacularly evident, even
today, but there were also other actors. One of the most interesting is the
patron, George Booth, whose activities in the social and economic networks
of architecture and design await reappraisal. Booth was a strong patron for
whom Cranbrook was not just an economic investment. He participated
in Cranbrooks design on many levels, including quite concretely. While I
was writing this article, I visited the exhibition Vision and Interpretation:
Building Cranbrook 19042012 at the Cranbrook Art Museum and was
thrilled to see George Booths sketches for buildings and spaces that have
become known as Eliel Saarinens and Albert Kahns architecture.
Loja Saarinen is best known today for modern decorative rugs and
figurative hangings for the Cranbrook interiors. The technically challenging
and time-consuming pictorial weaves were major projects for her studio.
The public exposure of her tapestry in the Golden Gate international
exhibition and elsewhere was certainly significant to her recognition as
a textile artist. However, there are facets to her work and career that still
await exploration.
I have used the idea of entrepreneurship to clarify the problematic role
of Loja Saarinen in regard to the textiles produced in her studio. I argue that
emphasising the input of the designer disguises the processes of a studio
collectivethe work of weavers, technical experts, artists and managers.
It is important to identify all of the contributors and give them recognition.
Authorship, however, is a complex issue and does not necessarily follow
the art historical convention of attribution by the artist-maker. In the case
of the Cranbrook Map, who gets credit in public depends on the context of
representation and is subordinate to corporate strategy, whether that of
Studio Loja Saarinen, that of the architect Eliel Saarinen, or that of George
Booths Cranbrook.
In Studio Loja Saarinen and at the Weaving Department of the
Cranbrook Academy of Art traditional hand looms were introduced into a
modern environment. Looms also appeared in the new Kingswood School
for girls, where weaving was a central part of the arts curriculum from the
Locating Meanings in Textile Art 221

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

References

Amberg, Anna-Lisa. 1984. Saarinens Interior Design 18961923,


Publications of the Museum of Applied Art 10. Helsinki: Museum of
Applied Art.
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Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays:
Painted Bodies and Ecclesiastical Space
in the Medieval Diocese of Turku

Katja Flt

Wall Paintings and Ecclesiastical Space

A medieval parish church was an ecclesiastical, ritual space in the service


of liturgical practice. This space was sacred and thus highly significant, a
sphere where it was possible to experience the visible and the invisible at
the same time, as well as to feel the presence of the holy. Here, human
experience could come into contact with the divine. Derek A. Rivard (2008)
has described the area as a place where human beings can experience two
worlds, the visible and the hidden, within material confines. Such a space
allowed individuals and the community to position themselves within the
world (Rivard 2008, 4546).
A space prescribes the behaviour of those who occupy it (Hanawalt
and Kobialka 2000, xi). A space may also be delineated or defined by
behaviour. In medieval churches the Elevation of the Host or the use of
other liturgical, movable objects at certain times or during certain events
staged, timed or structured the space. But behaviour or a physical act was
needed to delineate the place to be sanctified. In some instances the use of
movement and physical objects was essential to the creation of a sacred
space. According to Rivard (2008, 90, 98), in purification, consecration
or blessing rituals the sanctification of a specific place was of importance;
it was something that connected the concrete, spatial area with the divine
by means of a ritual process, such as consecration. In the consecration
ritual the bishop walked around in the church blessing the space with holy
water. Later, consecration crosses were painted on places where the water
had been applied as reminders of this ritual (Hiekkanen 2003). The ritual
activated the church as a sacred space. The consecration crosses made the
ritual circuit and the sprinkling of holy water visible; they were tangible
reminders of the activation.
228 Flt

All the elements inside the activated ritual space worked together to
strengthen the fully operational status of the church. Paul Crossley (1998,
16572) has tried to trace the programmatic meanings of the interiors
and to establish how images and objects were conceived as integrated
statements and appreciated as part of a spatial sequence. The imagery in a
church, which was set out in a more or less prescribed order, was closely
connected to the exercise of meditation, intellection or memory. Thus,
within the matrix of altars and altarpieces, relics and images, permanent
centres of meaning were formed. The altars generated meditation
centres or sequential patterns of thought, triggers for the ordered exercise
of intellection and memory. Thus, the arrangement of different visual
elements inside the church formed a sort of apparatus of devotion in which
each of the parts was connected and closely integrated into the others
(ibid.). Mary Carruthers (1998, 155, 26364) has offered a similar notion,
namely, that a church building works as an engine of prayer.
In the devotional machinery activated by ritual, images were equally
active cogs that could invite the viewer to seek the sight of the holy as
the highest experience of the divine (Hahn 1999, 187). Wall paintings
constituted one part of the visual surroundings of the ritual space and
functioned in direct relation to a specific space. Images can work as a visual
link between building and spectator, communicating the function of the
building. Images thus played an integral part in the viewers experience of
the space (Mathews 2000, 312; Olsen 2004, 1059). According to Barbara
Maria Stafford (2004, 332), images act in the context of ritual. They
delineate space as well as behaviour and are meaningful in the context of
the place in which they have been painted.
In this article I explore the kind of ritual space described above together
with representations of the body amongst the wall paintings attributed to the
work of church builders in the Diocese of Turku, Finland, and then examine
the relationship between the space and the paintings. The body is not just a
representation of a physical body consisting of flesh and blood; it is, to cite
Nicholas Mirzoeff (1995), a bodyscape. A bodyscape extends beyond
its boundaries, but for Mirzoeff (ibid., 3, 1921) it is also a complex of
signs, conceived as an area or a space where ideas, idealisations, concepts
and the like are located or dislocated. Representations of bodies can thus
be used to observe some of the concepts, concerns and ideas that are
articulated and negotiated in and through these representations. The body
is not just a natural entity; it is also a cultural entity. As argued by Michael
Camille (1994, 4), bodies could construct both communal and individual
identity. Here an attempt is made to examine some of the above-mentioned
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 229

notions about ecclesiastical space and the role of bodily representations


therein as part of the ritual machinery of the church and of cultural practices
and articulations. The focus is mainly on those representations that might
appear out of place in a church context and to provide interpretative
possibilities for such images from the perspective of space and place.
Conceptions of bodies fluctuate between the whole, perfect and ideal
body and the fragmented body and how these could be perceived in the
context of an ecclesiastical space. Although in the Middle Ages there
was a notion of the ideal human body, the idea of a single body in an all-
inclusive sense did not really exist (and could not have existed). The body
was always fragmented in one way or another. My examples focus on the
conceptual interactions between the fragmentation and the wholeness of the
body, between the bodys perfection and imperfection, and how the bodies
could be understood in the religious space in which they are found. These
bodily states are not treated as opposed to each other; rather they are seen
as being interwoven. In conceptual and visual formulations the notions of
the fragment and the whole are often inseparably intertwined.
The examples of bodies presented in this article were mainly painted
around the mid-fifteenth century in Finland, in churches located in Korppoo,
Maaria, Nauvo, Nousiainen, and Pernaja, and were based on similar visual
practices and cultural mediations. They are all expressions of the visual
idiom of church builders who were working in the Diocese of Turku in
south and southwestern Finland in the mid-fifteenth century. Most of the
representations were painted in completed ecclesiastical buildings, which
might indicate that the paintings were the last phase of the construction
process. There are fewer paintings in churches that were left unfinished
for some reason, and these too were the work of the builders. (Hiekkanen
2003, 7172). Today, paintings are still visible in about thirty medieval
stone churches in the Diocese of Turku (Hiekkanen 2007, 34; Stigell 1974,
5657; Edgren 2003, 3012).
The simple appearance and the seeming obscurity of many of the
portrayals have led to the idea that the paintings were largely detached
from traditional Christian religious imagery and iconography, which has
made it more difficult to situate them successfully in medieval image-
making (Wennervirta 1930, 7879; Riska 1987, 13744). The simple form
of many of the images has often deceived researchers into thinking that the
paintings manifest a simplicity of content and subject matter. The subjects
have generally been thought to express and relate to some obscure and
unidentified beliefs of people in the countryside, and thus mainly devoid
of Christian religious meaning (Riska 1987, 144; Edgren 2003, 31822).
230 Flt

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

Sacred Bodies and Sacred Space

The church was a lived public and social space imbued with different
bodily figures(corpo)real, sculpted and painted. The moving bodies of
living people encountered and confronted still, visualised bodies, all of
which were physically present in the ecclesiastical space. The relationships
between the actual, living and breathing bodies and the represented bodies
could be concrete, tangible and even intense in the late Middle Ages. In
some devotional practices the body was regarded as more important than the
eyes, and visual adoration could require a physical act, such as prostration
before the image. The body could have been a means of religious access
and a locus of the sacred (Walker Bunym 1991, 18384). Thus, bodies had
an important and integral role in ritual space.
Sacred bodiesthose of Christ and the saintshave a tradition of
legitimacy in a sacred space. The sacramental body of Christ was a focal
point for devotion in a sacred space. His body was perfect and holy, yet
at the same time he was frequently depicted as physically imperfect, bent,
tortured and bleeding. Other holy bodies were those of the saints, who
attained salvation and holiness specifically through their bodies. They
suffered as Christ had suffered and in so doing, bore witness to the presence
of God. Even though the saints had to endure physical torture and suffering,
their bodies were ultimately left intact and unharmed. In the Maaria Church
in what is today the northern part of Turku an image of St Lawrence holding
the instrument of his torture, a gridiron, was painted on the north wall. The
saint is depicted with a perfect and unharmed body, the post-torture phase
of the body after death (figure 111). The image represents the end-point
of the torture, which is visually absent from the bodily image, as are all
physical marks of persecution. The only thing denoting the act of torture is
the gridiron.
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 231

Figure 111. Saint Lawrence. Maaria church, north wall, late 1440s or early
1450s. Photograph Katja Flt.

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

a meditational hotspot in the church. The image also served as a visual


reminder of the constant presence of supernatural power (Baschet 1997,
108). The placement of saintly images close to altars also structured the
liturgical space. The image of St Lawrence in connection with such an altar
could have worked as a devotional aid, since on the north wall, the image
was visible to the congregation. Parishioners were expected to cultivate
relations of intimacy with and dependence on the saints and to honour
their images (Duffy 1992, 163). Visiting the altars of saints and praying
there was also encouraged by the episcopal authorities. Bishop Magnus
II Tavast granted indulgences for prayers to be given in specific churches
or at particular altars; one such prayer singled out the chapel of the Holy
Ghost in Rntmki (as Maaria was known earlier) in 1435 (FMU 2154,
FMU 2393, FMU 2415). Also amongst the prayers was the Ave Maria,
which was to be recited along with the Pater Noster before the images of
Christs grave and St Helena in the Cathedral of Uppsala (in Sweden). This
indulgence letter was issued in 1448 along with endorsements by other
bishops, including Johannes of Uppsala, Nicolaus of Linkping, Eric of
Strngns and Friar Acho of Vsters (FMU 2775). Although there is no
information about whether such activity and prayer before the image of St
Lawrence was encouraged by indulgences, these two examples seem to
indicate that individual devotional activity was encouraged by the episcopal
authorities. Directing attention to specific altars would have created
pressure for people to visit and honour these altars through prayer, gifts and
other commemorative acts. The communitys devotional activities within
the church were manipulated to a degree, although manipulation invoking
physical movement also delineates, constructs and shapes liturgical space.
The image of the body of a saint thus functioned both as a locus of
the sacred and a means of religious access. It was used in personal
contemplation and devotion while at the same time serving in a communal
context to structure the liturgical space. Depictions of saints also operated
in two realms: as mediators between the material, human world and the
immaterial, divine world. The image of a saint was always a reminder of the
divine realm, even though its physical presence was in earthly surroundings.
Thus, the saints image connected different bodies and spaces: the corporeal
and the spiritual, the human and the divine. The painted body united the
human body with the celestial sphere. The physical image of St Lawrence
may have embodied this divine, extra-terrestrial realm. Although there
are few medieval paintings in Turku that can be interpreted as indicating
a sacred space other than a church, close to the St Lawrence painting in
the Maaria Church are a rosette as well as two nearby stars, which might
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 233

have had some kind of cosmic significance. If these patterns are interpreted
as having meanings in connection with other symbols, then they might
denote the celestial realm to which the saint belonged. The rosette and the
stars might emphasise the saints ultimate status as an otherworldly, divine
being.
Images of saints could serve as a means of devotional appropriation in
which an image was used as a platform for concrete pious activity. In
such an appropriation the image worked as the contact zone between the
beholder and the divine, opening a concrete space for interaction (Plesch
2002, 16869, 188). A mysterious painting in the Korppoo Church might
signify something like this. A human figure above the pillar between the
churchs second and third vaults has been painted with very little detail,
although there are two different marks on the body as well as a series of
small circles painted around the head, suggesting a halo (figure 112). This
halo-like composition would seem to indicate a saintly rank. Yet the arms
are missing. Their absence fragments the whole and obscures the notion
of a functioning body, thereby raising several questions. Are the limbs
missing for a reason or because of a technical blunder? Was the identity
and function of the human figure clear, even without the limbs? It seems
unlikely that the painter forgot to paint the arms or ran out of time.
Occasionally, armless humans do appear in medieval sources, such as
manuscripts, and thus the Korppoo human does not represent a unique case
of the medieval understanding of the body.

Figure 112. Armless human. Korppoo church, second south pillar,


1440s50s. Photograph Katja Flt.
234 Flt

The cult of saints celebrated the completeness of a saints body, but also
its brutal fragmentation. A saints body could be broken, torn to pieces or
dismembered. One method of torture was tearing off the limbs of saints,
including those of Lawrence, Cyriacus and Hadrian. However, it seems
unlikely that the armless human in Korppoo represents a saint in a mid- or
post-torture phase. Perhaps the missing limbs do not conceptually fracture
the notion of the body; rather here, the body functions and performs
without arms. As Caroline Walker Bunym (1991) has demonstrated, the
medieval attitudes to physical partition and fragmentation were two-fold.
The fragmentation of the body was not necessarily seen as irreversible, as
God has the power to reassemble each body at the Resurrection. From this
perspective the limbs missing from the Korppoo human are missing only
visually. Nevertheless, the missing limbs pose a problem of interpretation,
since bodies and body parts were deemed integral to a person and were
regarded as places where persons could be punished or rewarded after
death, as argued by Walker Bunym. Certain body parts of remarkably
pious people could remain uncorrupted and intact after death. And even the
cult of relics reveals the importance attached to pieces of saintly bodies:
the bodily fragments were treated as if they were the saints themselves.
On the other hand, physical partition caused deep unease, and the intact
condition of the body after death was of serious concern. Dismemberment
was regarded as horrible, but saints were regarded as whole even if they
had been dismembered or otherwise mutilated (Walker Bunym 1991,
22934, 26597). As Walker Bunym (ibid., 272) has noted, the practice of
bodily partition was fraught with ambivalence, controversy and profound
inconsistency.
The image in Korppoo could be seen either as a place or as Walker
Bunyms locus for the sacred, which opened a space for devotional contact.
Private devotion tended to aim at physical participation, and devotional
tools often required concrete handling. Perhaps the marks here could
indicate that the painter, or painters, had a specific relationship with the
human depicted, someone perhaps to be understood as a saint. Certainly,
the marks on the saints body seem highly intentional and significant. They
could perhaps be likened to some form of writing. Bodies, fragmentation
and dismembered body parts were essential in medieval devotional
practices, but different forms of marking are also deeply connected to the
notions of bodies. According to Miri Rubin, writing is bound up with the
power of authority, authorship, mastery and production, qualities linked
with masculine principles in medieval culture. The female body especially
was likened to something that had to be made and written upon, and to
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 235

be adorned and made to carry marks offered by others (Rubin 1996, 23).
Christs body could be seen as a book in which the wounds were the writing.
Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie have noted how the bodies of Christ and
the saints have become metaphorical pieces of vellum onto which the terms
of mankinds salvation have been inscribed (Burgwinkle and Howie 2010,
35). A privileged type of marking was the stigmata, which proclaimed
perfection (Walker Bunym 1991, 183; Rubin 1994, 11011; Liepe 2003,
4849). Making these marks could thus be regarded as ritually structured.
In a way the marks could be seen as operating in a contact zone between
the maker and the saint, as a form of dialogue or interaction between the
beholder and the beheld (Plesch 2002, 16869, 188). This interaction was
devotional in nature, for it bore the hope that through the marks, the holy
figure would be reached. The painted body can also operate as a place
through which its devotees will be spiritually rewarded in the hereafter.
If the marks are understood as a kind of signature, then they reveal a
need to show the identity bound up with the saint. The individuals who
made the marks thus exist in the same divine sphere as the saint. It cannot
be said for certain whether the significance of these marks is based on
individual or communal aspirations. Both aspects can come into play in the
process of meaning-making, as do aspects of public and private spheres. As
the marks could imply some form of personal devotion, they were visible
in a public space to everyone. The marks could be seen as a form of self-
commemoration that communicated the status and devout ambitions of the
makers to the rest of the community by visual means. According to Sarah
Stanbury (2008, 181), a concrete (visual) relationship exists between the
members of a congregation and the material structure of their church. The
marks in connection with the Korppoo human could operate as visual links
between the parishioners, the physical space of worship (the church) and
the larger church community.

Bodies, Space and Gender

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

unsexed; the maleness or femaleness of the bodily representations is


seldom evident. There are few cases in which gender can be regarded as
apparent in one way or another, and in each of them gender is made explicit
in a different way. The depiction of a mermaid, painted in the coastal
churches of Nauvo, Korppoo, Nousiainen, and Pernaja in the 1440s and
1450s, is based on the concept of the mermaids feminine sex rather than
her feminine attributes. Mermaids have conventionally been depicted as
beautiful, long-haired women holding a comb and a mirror, with the mirror
representing human vanity, especially female pride, and more generally, sin
and spiritual danger. The mirror represented womens interest in vanities,
which was of concern to Catholic ecclesiastics, who frequently criticised the
feminine fascination with adornments. Only in the churches at Nousiainen
and Pernaja does the mermaids pose echo somewhat the conventional
image (figures 113 and 114). In both of these the mermaid is recognisably
feminine by her long hair, her hands either temptingly clasping her waist or
held up to her hair. In Nousiainen, the sexual connotations of the mermaid
appear to be emphasised by the position of the painting, which has been
placed above a depiction of a unicorn (Liepe 2003, 86).

Figure 113. A painting of a mermaid. Nousiainen church, fourth south


pillar, c. 1430s. Photograph Katja Flt.
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 237

Figure 114. A painting of a mermaid. Pernaja church, second vault of the


south aisle vault, c. 1440s. Photograph Katja Flt.

Various monsters and fabulous creatures have a long visual pedigree, as does
the mermaid, and frequently inhabited the mental and visual landscapes
of the medieval era. The mermaid, or siren, is a mythical aquatic creature
with an iconography that was already relatively stable in the Middle Ages.
The principal literary source involving mermaids and passed down to the
Middle Ages was The Physiologus, a didactic text in Greek compiled by an
unknown author in Alexandria and traditionally dated to the second century
CE. It contained descriptions of animals, birds and fantastic creatures, had
moral content and included different scriptural and patristic texts. Early
Christian writers combined mythological and Vulgate texts and created
a siren that caused eternal death by luring men into the false pleasures of
lust (Travis 2002, 39).
The Christian church found these creatures useful. In the moralistic
sense the mermaid, as half animal, half human, embodied spiritual
transgression. From the theologians point of view the semi-human
mermaid could be interpreted as having the capacity for advanced reasoning
because of its human head. The half-animal nature of the mermaid, on the
other hand, could suggest that the behaviour of these beings was ultimately
governed by their baser physical instincts. (Travis 2002, 39; Brown 1999,
5560; Hassig 1999, 7982). This physicality was naturally what made
mermaidsand womenso dangerous. Women were associated with the
238 Flt

body, as well as lust, weakness and irrationality. Medieval clerics saw the
female body as quintessentially grotesque because womens bodies were
seen as the cause of lust in men. Feminist scholarship has argued that in
the Middle Ages women were assimilated into the image of the monstrous,
and different monsters were clearly gendered in visual imagery. Dragons
slain (penetrated) by the male hero were occasionally depicted with breasts,
which represented the temptations of lust and the sins of the flesh and were
associated with bestiality. The notion of the animal-like nature of womens
reproductive organs stretched back to antiquity (Schiebinger 1993, 5355).
The mermaids hybrid body was thus seen as grotesque and monstrous.
Feminist scholarship has tended to see the mermaid as an example
of mulier mala, a strongly misogynous discourse about the figure of an
adulterous seductress. The medieval conceptions that connected women
and bodies were by nature complex, and the images of mermaids should
not be seen merely from the point of view of the misogynist discourse.
Nevertheless, the mermaid as a figure can be understood as an example of a
visual strategy that defined and made present the nature of mermaids, and
therefore the nature of women. Hybridisation, combining animal and human
forms to create completely new bodily combinations, can be perceived as
a visual device contributing to a grotesque presentation (Miles 1989, 120,
155). In the Nauvo and Korppoo churches the mermaid is quite creature-
like, more a monster than a beautiful woman, and these depictions seem to
emphasise the mermaids bestial nature over her womanly aspects (figures
115 and 116). In Pernaja, however, the mermaid has been painted so that
the body, itself a part of nature, is part of the surrounding foliage and thus
of nature, as if to place a double emphasis on this natural aspect. The body
of the mermaid in Pernaja could well be described by Nicholas Mirzoeffs
concept of the bodyscape: in this painting the mermaid does not merely
act against the background, but rather seems to challenge what is here
regarded as the body. In the medieval treatment of space the garland often
served as a background against which things, scenes and actions took place.
In Pernaja it is as if the garlands are extensions of the mermaids body. In a
way this whole composition constitutes a vibrant, vegetating bodyscape in
which the mermaids body has lost its boundaries. The mermaids body is
also a localisation or space that offers multiple entries into various cultural,
conceptual, ideological, social and spiritual mediations, condensed into the
form of a mermaid.
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 239

Figure 115. A painting of a mermaid. Nauvo church, second vault of the


south aisle, c. 1450s. Photograph Katja Flt.

Figure 116. A painting of a mermaid. Korppoo church, west wall, c. 1450s.


Photograph Katja Flt.
240 Flt

In an ecclesiastical context mermaids have often been interpreted as images


of morality denoting sin (Viholainen 2009, 1213; Hernfjll 1993, 137
39). It is difficult to establish whether the mermaid images in the Diocese
of Turku were used to impart a moral lesson by ultimately pointing to the
weakness of man. It is possible that the mermaid was a convenient image
for a priest to exploit and parishioners to understand, as they were often
people who depended on the sea for their livelihood, but any connections
between sermons and paintings are extremely difficult to verify. In all four
churches the placement of the mermaid is more or less readily visible; in
Pernaja and Nauvo the image was painted on the second vault of the south
aisle; in Nousiainen it is found on the north side of the fourth south pillar;
and in Korppoo it appears above the window in the west wall. That would
indicate that the mermaid was meant to be readily seen.
It has been a subject of speculation as to how men and women placed
themselves during mass in parish churches. The north side of the church
has often been regarded as the womens side, as it was associated with
the Virgin Mary, but in reality, the seating seems to have varied a great deal
(Hiekkanen 2007, 439; French 2005, 14143). Examples from England
show that in some churches, men were placed at the front of the church
and women at the back (French 2005, 141). Hiekkanen (2003, 14648) has
suggested that in the Diocese of Turku, seating might have been arranged
by social status. If men tended to be on the south side of the nave in Pernaja,
then perhaps the moralising image of the mermaid was intended for their
eyes. In Nauvo and Nousiainen the mermaid is also on the south side of the
nave, although in Nousiainen she is facing the central aisle and thus north;
in this position the painting would have been visible to a wider audience.
These mermaids could have functioned as a means of social control,
warning parishioners, both men and women, about the proper behaviour
expected of them in church and also outside the church, as they went
about their daily lives. The message would thus have differed for men and
women. To men, the mermaid might have served as a warning of the sexual
power and dangers of womens depravity. For women, whose sins were
often connected especially to their gender and their bodies, the mermaid
might have warned of the dangers of female sexuality if not controlled. The
mermaid could thus be seen as suggesting behaviour that was dependent on
the group to which a viewer belonged. The church provided a site for social
control, and an image of a mermaid provided a place for articulating
gender.
Other examples of the gendered body reveal one of the problems
connected to the paintings that are attributed to the church builders: the
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 241

ambiguous nature of many of the designs and the further exploration of


how such images ultimately functioned in the ecclesiastical space. In most
of the human or human-like representations in the Turku diocese, gender
is not explicit. In the Maaria Church two figures have been depicted in
a way that suggests male gender, their sexual organs visible. The figure
painted on the third vault of the central aisle is bellicose in appearance: he
appears to be wearing a helmet with a nose-guard and is holding a halberd.
The upper lip has been decorated with small strokes, perhaps indicating
a moustache. He also has a large beard and something that might be his
tongue sticking out. The body is curiously truncated, with the head slightly
detached. A simple decoration runs vertically through the body, and the
central straight line belonging to this decoration continues over the edge of
the body between the legs, almost like a small phallus. The feet are mere
stylised lines (figure 117). This figure has usually been considered a devil,
a pagan or a giant (Frankenhaeuser 1910, 13; Wennervirta 1937, 62; Riska
1964, 72; Riska 1987, 137; Edgren 2003, 308). The other figure depicted
on the third vault of the north aisle represents a human or human-like
creature who may be naked. He is holding two objects in his hand, which
have generally been interpreted as a whip and a purse (Edgren 2003, 319).
The creature has a unique headdress with a narrow extension flowing down
its left side. It resembles a chaperon turban with liripipe or other turban-
like headgear, which was fashionable in fifteenth-century Europe. His
eyes are large and bulging, and his small mouth is closed. Two lines along
each side of the body have been painted down from the shoulders and may
signify some sort of vestment. He seems to be wearing peculiar footwear.
He also seems to have a penis between his legs (figure 118). Usually, the
figure has been interpreted as some kind of monster or a devil (Riska 1964,
73; Edgren 2003, 319; Wennervirta 1930, 7576; Wennervirta 1937, 62).
There are visual similarities in the compositions of these two bodies in the
Maaria Church, mainly in the pose and in the relatively clear display of the
male sexual organs. With the figure on the third vault of the central aisle
this is quite subtle: the bodily exposure is only suggested by a line that
seems to be an extension of the decoration of the chest area. The degree of
exposure is more explicit in the other figure. In the early twentieth century
this painting was actually covered because it was considered obscene
(Frankenhaeuser 1910, 13).
242 Flt

Figure 117. A creature with a halberd. Maaria church, third vault of the
central aisle, late 1440s or early 1450s. Photograph Katja Flt.

Figure 118. A creature with two objects. Maaria church, third vault of the
north aisle, late 1440s or early 1450s. Photograph Katja Flt.

Bodies that appear simultaneously ambiguous and explicit seem to elude


interpretative categories. They have often been placed in the indeterminate
category of the monstrous, which operates as a pigeonhole for the
indefinable. These paintings have also been assigned a moral function,
as representations of devils or the embodiment of some social vice. The
tendency in Finnish scholarship to view the paintings as devils reduces
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 243

their visual and conceptual complexity. The figure on the north aisle
has been interpreted as a warning of the temptations in the male world:
excessive craving for money and sexual pleasure (Edgren 2003, 319).
Perhaps such implications are not completely out of the question, and the
figure is to be understood as embodying a social vice. In the medieval era
money was often depicted in a negative form; the worship of money was
the target of satirical attacks on the ugliness of worldly wealth and was
even seen as a form of idolatry. In visual culture Avarice (lat. Avaritia) as
the personification of the sin of greed was represented from the fourteenth
century onwards amongst the seven deadly sins as the root of all evil
(Camille 1989, 25859). Michael Camille (ibid., 262) has remarked that as
soon as money became an every-day object instead of an object of status
and luxury, it also became the shit of monkeys, depicted as spewing
from the mouths of monsters heads in the margins of manuscripts. There
is indeed something slightly menacing and monstrous in the appearance
of the human-like character in the Maaria Church; given the widespread
moralistic and damning accounts of the vileness of riches, depicting money
in connection with a monster-like being would have driven home the point.
The figure on the central aisle might serve as a martial metaphor for
doing spiritual battle whereby the helmet was to protect and the halberd was
to defend the faithful in their daily fight against evil. Fighting the devil and
sin were of special concern to the ecclesiastics. Nevertheless, the figures
appearance is relatively menacing, and the grimace with the tongue sticking
out has implications that are not exactly instructive. The tongue especially
has been regarded as expressing derision or as an obscene or blasphemous
gesture, similar to mouth-pulling and other such gesticulations. According
to Sarah Stanbury (2008), the tongue can imply both the sacred and the
profane. When the tongue is stuck out, a person is insulting others. At
the same time the tongue is sacred because it is the producer of language
(ibid., 154). The tongue sticking out might suggest the evils caused by the
tongue, such as blasphemy and gossip, which the faithful should avoid
(Camille 2002, 81). Perhaps the gesture and thus the whole image could
be understood as acting in an apotropaic sense, a form of contempt for the
devil. The image could thus function to protect the sacred space.
Are these two idiosyncratic figures to be understood as serving a similar
function? Both have been depicted with male sexual organs, although in the
case of the figure on the third vault of the central aisle, these are reduced
to a mere line. Even if the sexual organs seem to be visible, the figures
cannot be seen as sexual or erotic bodies in the modern sense. Madeline
H. Caviness (1998, 16566) has noted how displays of male potency were
244 Flt

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

Camilles example is situated in a different context, mainly in the streets


of the cities, but it could very well apply to the ecclesiastical setting. Thus,
the body, seen by some as monstrous and thereby negative, could in fact
be protective, a body with a positive function. Instead of representing the
devil, the figures could be repelling the devil from the confines of the ritual
and sacred space. The figures may thus partly function in a talismanic
way to protect the place while simultaneously defining a ritual space. The
paintings in the Maaria Church perhaps work the same way as street signs,
as suggested by Camille: they present an alternative, protective population
to those on altars and chapels found in churches (Camille 2000, 14).
The paintings thus protect the building just like the other ecclesiastical
paraphernalia found in altars and niches. These images too would form part
of Crossleys apparatusnot necessarily the apparatus of devotion, but
the apparatus that is subject to ritual. Instead of dismissing the detail of
exposed genitalia as somehow obscene, we might observe this specific
body part as opening a new level of interpretation in connection with the
place the image inhabits.
Here, an attempt has been made to take a few representations of the
body and examine how these could be understood in the context of
ecclesiastical space, specifically, in medieval parish churches in the Diocese
of Turku, Finland. The interpretations given here are not meant to suggest
that these are the only way the images function. Rather, the paintings seem
to operate in a spacious interpretative framework in which the meanings
attached to them can be multiple, overlapping, even antithetical. Thus,
the interpretations are not and should not be final. The bodies presented
here all have something in common: they clearly operate in and between
two realms. They combine the mundane and the divine, human and deity,
inside and outside. Sacred bodies articulate a sacred space and connect
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays 245

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

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V

Visible and Invisible Spaces


Let Us Possesse One World:
Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial
Love in John Donnes Poetry

Maria Salenius

The English poet and preacher John Donne (15721631), was born into
a prominent Catholic family, and later in life converted to the Church of
England. He was an admired poet, a respected preacher for King James
I and finally even Dean of St Pauls, one of the most important positions
in the Church.1 Within the canon of English literature, John Donne is
known primarily for his poetry, both secular and religious. His prose
texts, especially his sermons and the meditative collection Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions (1624), are central spiritual writings of the Early
Modern period. His poetry was later especially admired by the Modernists
of the early twentieth century.
The present article will concentrate on Donnes poetry, and it will show
how Donne uses images of space to illustrate different categories of love.
The article will demonstrate how Donne employs astronomical and/or
geographical metaphors (i.e. metaphors of stars and planets, spheres and
the universe as well as images of maps, continents and seafaring) in the
temporal and celestial representations of love in his poetry and thus declares
his understanding of the different nature of the sweet comprehensiveness of
the love of a man and a woman and the immense magnitude of divine love.
This article will further show how, with Donne, the secular form of love
shows a tendency to expand from a worldly space into the spheres above,
whereas divine love, itself infinite in range, is concentrated into a small and
restricted space.
Some critics have emphasised the contrast between Donnes worldly
verse and his divine poetry, while others have highlighted the similarities
between the writings of Jack Donne and Dr Donnethe young Catholic

1
The timing and nature of Donnes conversion has been the subject of much debate
and will not be pursued further in this context. For a discussion on the topic, see e.g.
Salenius 2001.
252 Salenius

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

The Concept of Love in the Early Modern Era

The idea and/or concept of loveboth secular and divineis a theme


well-known and much reflected upon by Donne, the daring love-poet who
became a man of the Church, and he eventually discussed the theme also in
his prose, especially in his marriage sermons.2 Achsah Guibbory (1986, 87)
points out that, in his sermons, Donne makes several connections between
mans Fall and his love for a woman (i.e. his supposed falling in love) (see
e.g. Donnes Sermons, vol. 5, no. 5, ll. 689 and vol. 6, no. 2, ll. 284
85). In this context Guibbory notes that Donne, although he was strongly
attracted by the possibility that love might be able to counter the decay
that resulted from the Fall, was apprehensive about temporal love as a
remedy against the passage of time; rather he saw mans love for woman
as being yet another example of the self-destructive tendency of man and
indeed the entire created universe (1986, 88). The evidence in the present
article will show that Donne addresses the same problem in his secular love
poetry. Donne seems to seek a form of love that would conquer the entire
universe, but temporal love does not achieve this goal.3

2
See e.g. Sermons, vol. 2, no. 17 (161920) and vol. 8, no. 3 (1627).
3
Terry Sherwood (1984, 12) has noted that the time span of Creation establishes
the design for developing time and that the Fall requires a realignment of that
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 253

Furthermore, M. Thomas Hester (1987, 62) has noted that the poets
attempt to create a poem about divine love can only be an image of the real
love of God, or an enigmatic re-signing of that love, because of the poets
(mans) fallen condition. Hester (ibid.) also talks about mans fall into
language as his gradual separation from the Word; with his language,
man seeks, and fails, to recreate divine significance. The present article
will show, however, that Donne stretches his eloquence to conceptualise
the divine influence in what one of his contemporaries, the rhetorician
George Puttenham (c. 152890) calls a manner of utterance and language
of extraordinary phrase through which the high mysteries of the gods
should be revealed and taught ([1589] 1999, 196). By using the framework
of the new worldview, Donne is able to make a distinction between the
incomprehensiveness of secular love and the comprehensiveness of divine
love.
These issues are relevant from the point of view of reading the different
sub-genres of the poetry and the different nature of the different types of
love. Furthermore, although Donnes religious lyric as a whole has been
placed in a plane somewhere between the spiritual and the temporal
(Summers and Pebworth 1987, x), taking into account the strong element
of subjective human experience expressed in them, it is still relevant to see
the sub-genres of secular and religious poetry as having different aims and
purposes. M. Thomas Hester (1987, 62) has defined the distinction between
secular and religious lyric in that the speaker of a [secular] love sonnet
aims to express his love for a beloved, to initiate an exchange of vows or
to obtain grace by the rhetoric of his words, whereas the speaker of
the religious lyric is not the lover but the beloved who must respond to
the signs of Gods love that have already been expressed in, and given
significance to, human history.4 Similarly, in the context of the present
article, secular love is defined as the love between lovers, whereas in divine

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

love the mortal lover is primarily the object of Gods love.5

Love as Space

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 60) discuss the spatialization of the concept of
love, and define love as a container metaphor, seeing the state of love
conceptualised as a container (ibid., 2932), and when discussing cognitive
metaphors, Heli Tissari has noted that most of the metaphors of love [in
the English language] have a spatial source domain (2003, 428, emphasis
added). These are significant observations when applied to Donnes poetry.
It becomes evident that, for Donne too, love is first and foremost a space,
a container, a room. Donne presents love as more than merely an abstract
feeling; he shows it as a controlled form of existence, defined within the
constraints of a given space.
The most striking example is the poem The Sunne Rising, addressing
the [b]usie old foole, unruly Sunne, who imposes upon the lovers (in a
bedroom, perhaps) [t]hrough windowes, and through curtaines, while
schoolboys and hunters move outside this restricted space of love-making.6

5
Although the present article will not address the biographical dimensions of
Donnes poetry, there is the question of the object of John Donnes secular love,
as well as his sincerity when discussing divine love. A number of scholars have
emphasised the importance of reading Donnes texts within the context of
biographical facts (see e.g. Flynn 1995), and many have made strong connections
between Donnes poetry and his life, and especially his relationship with his wife,
Ann More (see e.g. Hester 1997; Bell 2000; Radzinowicz 1987, 5758). If we
accept this link, then it grants the poems a stronger personal commitment and depth
of emotion than seeing the poetry merely as a courtly accomplishment (Carey
[1981] 1990, 56) of a poet writing his (secular) love poetry with little dedication
or someone who writes his divine poetry merely as a preparation for taking holy
orders (Radzinowicz 1987, 43) and with no interest in strengthening his readers
faith (Oliver 1997, 9). The present article indeed considers Donnes love (and
faith) genuine and sustained, and thus it is of even greater interest to read his poems
as a continuum of images and themes.
6
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 255

Here temporal love(-making), although perhaps imaginary when imagined


for the purpose of the poem, is contained within the walls of the room. The
sun disturbs this act, invading the space that the poet deems belongs to the
lovers alone.
Somewhat more abstractly, in the poem The Flea the love (in the
form of mixing the two lovers blood) is constrained in the space formed by
the body of the insect:
It suckd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
(ll. 34)

In the form of this blood sucked from both lovers, then, the meeting is
cloystered within walls, which thus metaphorically come to represent
the mariage bed and the mariage temple (see below). Here the insect
becomes a metaphor for each lover as well as for the bed and the love-
making. The lovers can consummate their love metaphorically within the
body of the insect when they cannot do so in real intercourse:
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, ware met,
And cloystered in these living walls of Jet.
(ll. 1215)

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

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;


Love, all alike, no season knowes nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.
(ll. 110)
(For those poems not quoted in full in the text but whose context seems especially
relevant, a larger excerpt is given in the notes. All quotations from the poems follow
the 1967 edition by John T. Shawcross.)
256 Salenius

The Concept of Divine Love

In discussing Miltons view of Gods love, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy
(1994, 41) see this love primarily through lumen naturale rationis; on the
one hand, in the generative creativity of the natural world and, on the
other hand, in grace towards man or humanity. Furthermore, Carrithers and
Hardy claim that this grace is the poetic and theological link between Gods
love and human efforts at love (ibid.). This is an essential point in reading
Donnes concept of Gods love. Within the theme of love in his divine
poetry, Donne is much more subtle than in his secular poems: rarely, with the
exception of the copious mentions in A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last
going into Germany (to be discussed in more detail below), where Donne,
for example, presents God as thEternall root of true Love, does he use the
actual word love (nor does he refer to the near-synonyms, like charity).
Yet it is in the grace of God towards man that His love is manifested.
Mostly, then, love in Donnes divine poetry must be approached from
a functional point of view, from the act of love, from how God shows His
love to man. The Gospel of John provides the starting-point here, stating
that God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life
(John 3:16; emphasis added). Thus, it is mainly the descriptions of Gods
grace, His mercy and salvation, of His giving Christ to the world, that show
instances of divine love in the world. This leaves man the more passive
receiver of the signs of Gods active love, as opposed to being the more
active initiator of secular love (see Hester 1987, 62 discussed above). In
Donnes religious verse this act of love is performed in, or in relation to, a
space. Frances M. Malpezzi (1995, 141) has particularly considered how
Donnes religious imagination transcends the particularities and limits of
his time and place.
In the poem A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into
Germany, Donne opens the first stanza in one of his most powerful
analogies, defining the space of Gods love as the ship and the sea:
In what torne ship soever I embarke,
That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;
What sea soever swallow mee, that flood
Shall be to mee an embleme of thy bloode;
(ll. 14)

Here the ship (the container, the space) is an emblem, a metaphor for Gods
sacrifice for man. Gods love is epitomised within the sides of the vessel,
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 257

carrying man (Noah) to safetyand, on a further level, even the Law of God
for posterityor in the curb of the seabed, containing the flood of sinand
ultimately the blood of Christ for mans salvation. The Ark of Noah becomes
the Ark of the Covenant and, finally, the Holy Grail, a cup containing
(according to some of the legends) the blood of the crucified Christ.
The theme of sacrifice is elaborated upon in a further image of seafaring
in the second stanza of the poem as the speaker of the poem, in turn,
sacrifice[s] this Iland, his country, to God. This sacrifice contains the
speakers earthly love:
I sacrifice this Iland unto thee,
And all whom I lovd there, and who lovd mee;
When I have put our seas twixt them and mee,
Put thou thy sea betwixt my sinnes and thee.
(ll. 811)

Although Donnes sacrifice here primarily is the sacrifice of departure, the


mirror-image gains depth in meaning from the aspect of love: the speaker
gives up his secular love, but wishes to gain (or experience) divine love, in
the form of absolution and grace. When the speaker makes the geographical
sacrifice (or bargain even), he turns geographical distance into a metaphor
for Gods ability to separate mans sins from his hope of salvation.7
Furthermore, it is not only the seas, but also the heavens that distance
man from his loveand especially from Gods love. Earlier in A Hymne
to Christ Donne places the metaphor of distance within the context of
heaven and earth, in the second part of the first stanza:
Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise
Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,
Which, though they turne away sometimes, they never will despise.
(ll. 57)

Here Donne places God in the metaphorical heavens, behind cloudsor in


Heaven behind His angerthus separating man from God. The metaphor
shows that God has the ability to hide His face from man and even turn His
eyes away, to create even more distance between God and man. Here the
imagery of the heavens, of heaven and earth, space and the universe, provides
a powerful metaphorical framework for discussing various aspects of divine
and temporal love. The poetic language of Donnes time made ample use

7
Heli Tissari (2003, 343) has observed that, especially in Early Modern English,
love seems to be predominantly expressed through the concept of distance.
258 Salenius

of both the medieval imagery and the heliocentric worldview. These gain
strength from the paradoxes they present by creating metaphors outside their
conventional conceptual systems (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 139 ff.).
In a similar way in his poem Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,
Donne uses further planetary imagery in his favoured metaphor when
referring to the setting (dying) and rising sun (Son). As the sun must set in
order for a new day to dawn, likewise must the Son (of God) die in order
for endlesse day to evolve:
Hence ist, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
(ll. 912)

The speaker here goes towards the geographical west as well as, more
metaphorically, towards his own death (West), but he wishes his soul to
reach Christ and resurrection (East). Later in this poem Donne refers to
how the death of Christ made the Sunne winke (l. 20; cf. Matt. 27:458),
perhaps suggesting (as in A Hymne to Christ) that with this planetary
eclipse God turns away from man.9 Likewise, in the poem Resurrection,
imperfect, Donne elaborates on his metaphor of (the planet) sun vs. the
Son (of God), suggesting that the sun setting, or the Son dying (by being
raised on the cross, like in Goodfriday, 1613), although being wounded,
is a better Sun.
Sleep sleep old Sun, thou canst not have repast
As yet, the wound thou tookst on friday last;
Sleepe then, and rest; The world may beare thy stay,
A better Sun rose before thee to day,
(ll. 14)

Donne develops his metaphor further by associating the wounds of Christ


to those of the eclipse of the sun, and the death-sleep of Christ to the
suppression of light from the planet.
The three poems above all include the metaphors of (geographical)
space, especially in the form of creating or resisting distance, as well as of
cartographic encountering, linked to astronomical (planetary) space. Divine
8
And now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth
hour.
9
This particular aspect of the poem has elsewhere been linked to Donnes notions
about God and the concept of sight (Salenius 1998, 150).
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 259

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

Secular Love and Cosmology

From the point of view of cosmological experience, it is relevant to note


that secular love, starting in the room, always seems to expand, explode
even, beyond its worldly limits or limitations. L. M. Gorton (1999, 61) has
noted how Donnes lovers call upon images of the cosmos and how they
use space as the imaginative language to describe loves privacy, and
its power. In The Sunne Rising (referred to above) the poem starts in
a small room with the two lovers, in itself a very restricted scene. In the
second stanza, however, Donne employs the same planetary image as in the
two divine poems discussed above, and he first presents the image of the
sun being disguised from the mortal eye:
Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
(ll. 1114)

The metaphor here is secular, however, and the speaker himself (not God) is
the one hiding the sun from view. Just as God could turn away from man,
or winke (in A Hymne to Christ and Goodfriday, 1613 respectively),
here the lover, too, canor couldnow winke and lose sight of the

10
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for thats as good
As if thouhadst seald my pardon, with thy blood.
(ll. 914)
260 Salenius

woman, but he chooses not to do so, he does not want to stop looking at her.
Later in the same stanza in The Sunne Rising the poet parallels the
action (of his love, or of love-making) with phenomena from the realm of
exploration and world trade as well as a multitude of kingships:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both theIndias of spice and Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou sawst yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.
(ll. 1420)

Here the whole world can be seen in the lovers bed.11 The image is
extended by the geographical stretch of referring to both theIndias
India in the East as well as the West Indies, the latter having rather recently
shown up on European maps. The following stanza elaborates on the image
of the expanded world:
Sheis all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us . . . .
(ll. 2123)

The microcosm is absolute as [n]othing else is. The lovers and their
love-bed are the whole world. A little later, the sun, initially chided for
waking the lovers, can concentrate on them and still be everywhere, and by
warming the lovers the sun can warm the world:
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, thats done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.
(ll. 2730)

The image as such is medieval: the earth (here: the bed) is the centre of the
universe, and the walls of the room are the sphere of the sun. By likening
the room and bed to the whole universe, (secular) love can eventually reach
beyond the limits of the given space, stretch beyond the known world,

11
L. M. Gorton has also noted how Donnes perspective shrinks harvest workers into
scurrying ants (1999, 62; see l. 8 of the poem: Call countrey ants to harvest offices,
quoted in n6 above).
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 261

and be every where. In Donnes image secular love expands in order to


embrace the universe.
Likewise, in the poem The Good-Morrow, a similar expansion takes
place. In the second stanza love . . . makes one little roome, an every
where, and thus the image extends geographically to include new worlds:
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.
(ll. 1014)

The image of the sea-discoverers and maps is important: with the help
of maps and exploration man took possession of the earth in the times of
discoveries. For Donne, then, secular love is empowering, dominant, and
even authoritarian, presented in images of worldly conquest and triumph.
Donnes speaker is very much the dominating, ravishing male, drawing
his language from the domain of government and control. The poet/lover
conquers the space by taking (possession of) the body.
Finally, in the third stanza in The Good-Morrow, the circle originally
formed by (the gaze of) the two lovers encompasses the universe:
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
(ll. 1518)

The lovers, first presented in the context of their countrey pleasures


(in stanza one), see each other (and their hearts) in each others eyes and
can make their little room an every where; they can possess the world.
Finally, they create two hemispheares, and thus, just by holding on to
one another, their love creates a universeand, at least for the moment of
love(-making), this world has no death or decay.
Similarly, in stanza 4 of The Canonization, where love, and the
lovers legend, is unfit for tombes and hearse, the lovers will build in
sonnets pretty roomes to define their love in a space.12 Here too the whole

12
Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombes and hearse
Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse;
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
262 Salenius

worlds soule is then seen in the lovers eyes (final stanza):


Who did the whole worlds soule extract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above
A patterne of your love!
(ll. 4045)

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

Divine Cosmology

Donnes divine poetryand thus his approach to divine loveworks in the


opposite direction: here love originates in the endlessness of Gods being,
but is then condensed, crystallised even, into a small space. In the second
sonnet (entitled Annunciation) in the sonnet cycle La Corona the
immensity of Gods ultimate love notably begins in the every where to
which profane love aspires, but is then confined in a little room, cloysterd
in the womb of the Virgin:
That All, which alwayes is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye
In prison, in thy wombe . . .
.......................
Thouhast light in darke, and shutst in little roome,
Immensity, cloystered in thy deare wombe.
(ll. 1620; 2728)

Well build in sonnets pretty roomes;


As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
And by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canonizd for Love.
(ll. 2836)
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 263

Here Donne uses the same metaphor of cloistering as in the poem The
Flea, but the image is crucially different. In The Flea the restricted
space of the insects body becomes the scene of the meeting (and of the
metaphorical love-making) of the lovers. From within the insect the tiny
drops of blood finally expand metaphorically to represent full-blown
intercourse, whereas in Annunciation the immense love itself is expressly
contracted and enclosed in a markedly small space. The paradox is that, by
being consummated within the insect, temporal love can expand, defeat the
grudging parents, and eventually even multiply and be every where.
Significantly, Gods love does not expand or explode. It is defined in
a space, and this space is condensed and focused. Terry Sherwood (1984,
13) has indicated how the prophesy of Christ is fulfilled in the womb of
the Virgin. He elaborates upon the point further by referring to St Pauls
words about all fullness dwelling in Christ,13 noting that time is thus
literally filled full (ibid.). In Donnes terms, then, the contraction of the
love simultaneously here also creates a whole, a completion. Patricia G.
Pinka (1987, 172) has noted how, by commemorat[ing] the historical birth
of Christ in its return on the spiritual calendar, nativity poems by Milton
and Herbert move outside of time themselves into the spiritual present of
eternity. Similarly, echoing Psalm 139, in this sonnet by Donne the womb
of the Virgin is a place referred to by God at a time [e]re by the spheares
time was created (l. 23).14 Thus also the starting point for the love of God
is beyond the scope of the known world and of time; it is found in the
endlessness of eternity and space.
Later in the same sonnet cycle (in the seventh sonnet, Ascention),15

13
For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell (Col. 1:19).
14
Ere by the spheares time was created, thou
Wast in his minde . . .
(ll. 2324)
15
Salute the last and everlasting day,
Joy at theuprising of this Sunne, and Sonne,
Yee whose true teares, or tribulation
Have purely washt, or burnt your drossie clay;
Behold the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the darke clouds, which hee treads upon,
Nor doth hee by ascending, show alone,
But first hee, and hee first enters the way.
O strong Ramme, which has batterd heaven for mee,
Mild lambe, which with thy blood, hast markd the path;
Bright Torch, which shinst, that I the way may see,
Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath,
264 Salenius

Donne presents his frequently used pun saluting the uprising of


this Sunne, and Sonne (l. 86). Within the framework of spatial
definitions, and in relation to Goodfriday, 1613 (discussed above),
it is significant to see that the immensity of God, the creator of all the
universe (and thus perhaps predestined to reach beyond the spheres),
is metaphorically condensed into a planet (albeit the largest in our solar
system) and eventually (theologically) into a man, the mortal son of God.
A similar phenomenon is further elaborated upon in Donnes poem Hymne
to God my God, in my sickness. In this poem Gods ultimate love, evident
in Christs sacrifice and Gods grace (cf. John 3:16, quoted above), is
reflected in the space of a good death (i.e. death leading to salvation),
which Donne presents as a holy room (stanza one):
Since I am comming to that Holy roome,
Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique; As I come
I tune the Instrument here at the dore,
And what I must doe then, thinke here before.
(ll. 15)

This space, the room, is the ultimate goal of man, the focus of his existence.
Coming from the world, man enters a space of Gods love; having lived in
the vastness of earth, man arrives at a restricted space.
Yet for this journey from the world to Gods restricted room Donne
needs directions, and he evokes the image of the sea-discoverers
and new worlds (cf. The good-morrow above): in Hymne to God
my God, man himself in his illness16 is a map for his physicians, the
Cosmographers, to explore. In the second and third stanzas Donne
presents images of discoveries as well as of straits and currents that take
seafarers to new lands:
Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne
Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne
That this is my South-west discoverie
Per fretum febris, by these streights to die,

And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise,


Deigne at my hands this crowne of prayer and praise.
(ll. 8598)
16
This poem most likely refers to Donnes near-fatal illness in 162324, or,
alternatively (and as suggested by Donnes first biographer, Izaak Walton), to his
final illness before his death in 1631.
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 265

I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;


For, those theire currants yeeld returne to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
(ll. 615)

In this map, the flat representation of earth, whereby Donne presents the
spatial paradox [as] a spiritual mystery (Gorton 1999, 68) by stating that
east and west are one, death leads to Resurrectioni.e. only through
Christs (and eventually mans own) death can man receive Gods love,
enter the holy room, and gain everlasting life. Furthermore, this map also
leads to the focal point of the first created man as well as of Christ (the
man)to the Fall as well as to salvation. Donne refers to the image of the
garden of Eden having been located at the site of the cross (fifth stanza):
We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie,
Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place;
Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;
As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.
(ll. 2125)

The first Adam represents the Fall, whereas the last Adam (i.e. Christ)
grants man the means to salvation: only through Christs (purple) blood
can man enter the holy room (l. 26, final stanza).17 As Christs cross and
Adams tree stand in one place and both Adams are thus found in man, who
is embraced by their sweat and blood, eventually all of Gods love for man
is focussed on one point on the map.
The map gives the physicians directions for finding the root of the
illness, but on a further metaphorical level, it is also the map for mans soul
to find the holy room. In the fourth stanza Donne seeks his (souls) true
home on the map, making geographical explorations throughout the new
world:

17
So, in his purple wrappd receive mee Lord,
By these his thornes give me his other Crowne;
And as to others soules I preachd thy word,
Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine owne,
Therefore that He may raise the Lord throws down.
(ll. 2630)
266 Salenius

Is the Pacifique Sea my home? Or are


The Easterne riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltare,
All streights, and none but streights are wayes to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem.
(ll. 1620)

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

18
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
Theintelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
(ll. 16)
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 267

span the Poles, / And turne all spheares at once (ll. 2122), and which
thus define the scene. It is the death of Christ that shocks the natural order
of things, on a temporal level with earthquakes and solar eclipses, and on
an existential/ontological level by conquering death. Here Gods ultimate
sacrifice reaches from the heavens to man and is finally fixed between the
two bleeding hands of Christ:
It made His own Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made His footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turne all spheares at once piercd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and toour Antipodes,
Humbled below us? . . . .
(ll. 1925)

In the three last lines above, Gods love, in the form of the sacrifice, is
humbled from endlesse height down to mans world to die for him. This
concentrates Gods love into a restricted space on earthand eventually to
a mortal man, Christ dying on the cross.
In the Holy Sonnet I am a little world Donne presents the universe
as a metaphor for man, like a world made cunningly / Of Elements
not unlike the metaphorical universes in The Sun Rising and The good-
morrow discussed above. Yet in I am a little world the metaphorical
world (like the map in Hymne to God my God) is a creation of
Gods hands, not an expansion of mans world. Here both parts (both
hemispheres) of this old world (i.e. body and spirit) must die on earth in
order for man to gain salvation:
I am a little world made cunningly
Of Elements, and an Angelike spright,
But black sinne hath betraid to endlesse night
My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die.
(ll. 14)

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

Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly,


Or wash it if it must be drownd no more:
(ll. 59, emphasis added)

In this image the new (temporal) lands are diminished in relation to Gods
heaven, which is most high, and they are controlled by God. Gods love
and mercy is brought down from the spheres onto the map of the temporal
world. Here the condensed form is related to (alchemical) purification,
which is presented in the Lords fiery zeale (ll. 13).19 Similarly, in
Resurrection, imperfect Donne elaborates upon the same image, stating
that Christ entered the grave already in a (metaphorically) noble form, but
the resurrection transmuted Him even further and enabled Him to turn
imperfection into perfection (here: salvation):
Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.
(ll. 1316)

The alchemical procedure includes the condensation of matter into a purer


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

Conclusions: Temporal versus Celestial Love

In Donnes poetry the idea of love is largely discussed in terms of


metaphors of geographical and cosmological space. Donne is indeed
known to have been fascinated and inspired by the phenomena of the
changing world, and much of his work contains references to geographical

19
But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and enviehave burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; Let their flames retire,
And burne me Lord, with a fiery zeale
Of theeand thy house, which doth in eating heale.
(ll. 1014)
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 269

as well as cosmological events of his time.20 Furthermore, the declaration


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

decay, the metaphorical framework discussed here challenges this notion:


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

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Bell, Ilona. 2000. Courting Anne More. John Donne Journal 19:59
86.
Biblia Sacra. 1969. Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft.
Carey, John. (1981) 1990. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. New Edition.
London: Faber.

21
Encountering the unknown in Early Modern English texts, including Donne, has
also been discussed in Salenius 2007.
The Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love 271

Carrithers, Gale H. Jr. and James D. Hardy, Jr. 1994. Milton and the
Hermeneutic Journey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
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Docherty, Thomas. 1986. John Donne, Undone. London: Methuen.
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. (1611) 1969. Ignatius his Conclave. Edited by T. S. Healy, S.J.
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. 195362. Sermons. Edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn M.
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. 1987. Re-Signing that Text of the Self: Donnes As due by Many
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. 2001. The Circle and the Line: Two Metaphors of God and
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. 2007. Textual Voyages Beyond the Pillars of Hercules: English
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E. Medine. The Pennsylvania State University Press.
The Disappearance of Gravity:
Airy Spaces in Contemporary Art

Hanna Johansson

In 2012 visitors to dOCUMENTA (13), the most important regular


contemporary art exhibition in the world and held in Kassel, experienced
an odd phenomenon in the entrance hall of the main exhibition venue, the
Fridericianum. This hall and the adjacent exhibition spaces on the ground
floor were empty. Because the exhibition leaflet said that there was an
artwork in these rooms, curious viewers moved inquiringly around the
big empty spaces. Every now and then, they noticed a gust of air, slightly
stronger than that produced by a normal fan. The artwork in fact was a
work of moving air that gently pushed and pulled the visitor though the
clean, white rooms. The work in question, I Need Some Meaning I Can
Memorise (The Invisible Pull), by the British artist Ryan Gander raised
some important themes to which I wish to draw attention: on the one hand,
how to make invisible non-human actors and forces visible, and on the
other hand, the fragile and problematic relationships between art and life,
between the natural and the technological.
The second of these topics stems from the art of the 1970s, when artists
developed strategies to overcome the chasm between art and life (Kaprow
1996; Johansson 2005, 3639). Ganders work gives a fresh interpretation
of this relationship. First of all, the breeze in the museum was not life as
such, in the form of bare bios, i.e. biological life. A breeze is a natural
phenomenon, but in this context, it was anything but natural. Instead, it was
technologically produced, the result of a long-planned process. Further, the
work was connected to life outside the art world in the sense that it alluded
to the air conditioning, which, on a hot summer day, is present and tangible
in many public and private interior spaces all over the world. In Kassel in
this case the point was not air conditioning, but an installation artwork that
disturbed the border between the natural and the artificial as well as the
border between art and non-art.
The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on recent visual works of
art that have as their main subject the element of air. I am interested in
274 Johansson

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

Breeze: The External Cause of the Work

Ryan Ganders work was hard to represent. The work was neither visual
nor visible. The only way to catch the work in a visual representation was
to look at the viewers hair or clothes moving. The source of the air current
in the exhibition space was also invisible and unknown, and visitors were
seen searching for the source of the breeze, but without success. Because
it seemed clear that there was an external cause for the breeze in the
exhibition hall, the moving air became a sort of a fantasy or technological
mystery.
In this regard Ganders work evoked many art historical associations.
Wind or breeze has been a subject of art at least since the early Renaissance.1
Yet according to Georges Didi-Huberman, this subject was not seen until
the 1890s when Aby Warburg made it into an art historical subject. Warburg
re-invented our way of seeing Renaissance art by placing bodily motion
and the displacement of affects at the centre of our perception (Didi-
Huberman 2003, 277). One of these inventive considerations concerned

1
Imaginary breeze was a topic of painting earlier than Didi-Huberman states.
Renaissance art draws on a long tradition, which stretches back to antiquity and
continued uninterrupted through the Middle Ages. See Raff 197879, 71218 and
Didi-Huberman 2003, 279.
The Disappearance of Gravity 275

the meaning of wind and air in Renaissance paintings through which the
fluidity of bodies was visualised. In Quattrocento paintings draperies are
in the wind as the wind is in the draperies, in the hair and all around the
body (ibid., 275). Warburg made us see that the wind does not just pass
over things in the painting, but profoundly touches the things it passes
over so that they are transformed and metamorphosed. Warburg spoke
about wind as an imaginary breeze and an external cause of or force on
the image. The power of the wind gave paintings forms that touched the
viewers. Warburg called this the Pathosformel, a form that evokes pathos.2
In Renaissance art wind was a supernatural phenomenon, and when it
appeared in an image, it did not necessarily involve the whole scene of
a painting, but only certain figures or a part of the whole. This spatial
incoherence was characteristic of early Renaissance paintings, such as
Botticellis Primavera, where wind has a functional meaning. It sways
and shakes and touches. Mobilising air became a vehicle for mediating
pathos (feeling), but air in the form of wind also causes movement through
time and permeates and induces pathos in the depicted bodies (Didi-
Huberman 2003, 277). Air was not understood as a natural element that
everyone breathes and that is necessary for life, but rather as an individual
style, fantasy and spirit, anima. This indicates a correspondence between
an inner and an outer mood, or temper, which culminates in a connection
between weather and a state of mind. This tradition was long-lasting; still
at the beginning of the nineteenth century Carl Gustav Carus was defining
the main task of landscape art as representing a certain mood through the
depiction of a corresponding mood in the life of nature (Wamberg 2010,
173). Air also alluded to the atmosphere in the sense of the spirit of a
place; thus, Vasari could attribute the revival and success of the arts and
artists in Florence to the influence of air on the spirit of paintings and
painters (Summers 1987, 121).
Although in Renaissance Florence wind was recognised as an external
cause of the image (Didi-Huberman 2003, 27577),3 it was not regarded
as an element or an important part of life outside art. Still, I would argue
that there are common denominators between the understanding of air
in the Renaissance and its understanding in contemporary art. Air has a
power over visible things. In the art of the Quattrocento, air revealed
nudity, motion and the intimacy of bodies. In Ryan Ganders contemporary
2
Pathosformel is one of the key concepts of Warburgs theory. On Pathosformel,
see Hurttig 2012.
3
Die uere Veranlassung der Bilder (Warburg 1998, 4555, quoted in Didi-
Huberman 2003, 277).
276 Johansson

installation, the breezy air made viewers pay attention to other viewers so
that at some moments, the work created a sudden, accidental community in
the Fridericianum exhibition halls. The breath of wind affected the viewers
and their relationship to each other.
Air and its phenomena in the sky have been used in art both as a
releaseat least somewhatfrom gravity, and from the laws of perspective.
Didi-Huberman (2003) recognised that in Botticellis Primavera form and
intensity combine in the gestures of the Graces and the subtle elevations
of the aere. This corporeal velocity (prestezza corporale) falls under the
category of phantoms (fantasmata) as defined by Italian choreographers:
in suspending immobility and motion, the dancer must suddenly become
a phantasmal shadow (ombra phantasmatica). It means that dancers
escape gravity and their earthly conditions (Didi-Huberman 2003, 286).4
Since the Renaissance, air has appeared in several ways in the visual
arts. Romantic airy landscape paintings are one example (Didi-Huberman
2003; Fermor 1992, 4647; Castelli 1987, 3557). Heavenly bodies and
clouds have been used to depict invisible things and states of mind, such
as love and religious feelings, which are rarely visible. Air in the form
of clouds has also disturbed the coherent visual experience in theories of
perspective. As Hubert Damisch (2002, 123) has shown, clouds did not fit
into Brunelleschis first perspective image of the baptistery at Florence.
Brunelleschi did not attempt to depict the sky; he merely showed it. In
order to fit a perspective image, things must occupy a place and have a
contour that can be defined by lines. The problem with the sky is that it has
no such definition nor does it occupy a place. The sky does not even have a
shape to be explored in terms of a surface. Owing to its fluid characteristic,
air reveals the limitations of the perspective code (ibid., 124).
To understand how gravity and the laws of perspective are interwoven,
we should recall what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(2007) said about perspective: Even if perspective does not deceive us,
it nevertheless positions the world in an odd way, excluding mysteries or
reducing them to non-existence. Explaining the inadequacy or downright
deceptiveness of perspective projection, Merleau-Ponty took as an example
the moon in the sky, the size of which cannot be calculated by reference
to standard measurements corresponding to a coin in the hand. The moon
is a so-called ultra-thing, which is not part of projective gradation in the
4
For Warburg, dancers without gravity become semblances of the ancient gods,
an airy creature of dreams and the afterlife: an embodiment of Nachleben (Didi-
Huberman 2003, 286). On Warburgs notion of Nachleben, see Didi-Huberman
2010.
The Disappearance of Gravity 277

same way as things that are close, on the ground or in this room. The moon
resides in the realm of absolute size just like other ultra-things: the sun,
the stars, even the clouds. In other words, to fight the man-made laws of
perspective, we must turn our attention to things that are not earth-bound,
but situated in space, or at least in the atmosphere and the sky, and therefore
escape gravity (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 250; 27778).

Blurred Vistas, Haptic Visuality


and the Contemporary Sublime

John Constable, the English landscape painter, observed in 1821 that the
sky is a source of light in nature and governs everything (Leslie 1995,
73). In landscape art the sky has the characteristic of being a medium; it
mediates between the viewer and the topics and objects in the landscape.
The Danish art historian Jacob Wamberg (2010) has realised that the sky
and the air are important parts of the modern visual process. He takes up
Platos statement that distance has the effect of befogging the vision of
nearly everybody and gives two interpretations. The statement can either
be read as the fog of the world getting in the way of vision or that vision
itself becomes foggy with distance (Wamberg 2010, 177) (see plate 131).
The photograph called Whiteout (Fence) (2005) by the Finnish artist
Axel Antas makes Wambergs argument visible. The image seems to
have two layers, one on top of the other. A deep layer opens onto a rural
landscape view. This landscape view, however, is disturbed and obscured
by another layer veiling it. This white, translucent curtain or thick fog,
which nearly conceals the landscape, draws the viewers attention to the
very surface of the image. Whiteout (Fence) starts to matter only because
of this double structure. It forces the eye of the beholder to move to the
distant landscape and back again to the milky surface.
The effect is the same as its title indicates; the white level almost
bleaches out the illusionary image, which the viewer can still perceive.
Although Axel Antas is known for making landscape photographs ad
nauseam that resemble the Rckenfiguren compositions of the German
Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Whiteout (Fence) differs
completely from these typical Friedrich-like compositions, which have
an internal viewer with which the external viewer of the image readily
identifies. In my mind Whiteout (Fence) is linked to something else,
something other than commentary or mimicry of Romantic imagery and its
transcendental nature.
278 Johansson

Antass image is connected with two interesting things: it challenges


the clear-cut definitions of pictorial space and also of the picture plane. It
is hard to determine whether the milky veil is included in the landscape or
whether it is situated on a picture plane. The latter case indicates that the
white veil is a part of the photographs materiality as an abstract, smooth
stain on the pictures surface. In the first case the work functions purely
as representation, and the white veil appears to be the misty air floating
everywhere. Hence, the white foggy air refers to the natural condition
of the landscape, that is, to weather and climate. The same whiteout is
recognisable in a much earlier conceptual work by another Finnish artist,
Lauri Anttila, entitled Valokuvattua ilmaa (1972, Photographed air). Here
Anttila has focused the cameras lens on the air and not on the cathedral in
the background, which has become so blurred that it is hardly visible.
These photographs by Antas and Anttila seem to have something in
common, namely, the interest in the almost invisible element of air and our
technologically-linked relationship (via camera) to air. This was also one of
the essential issues in Ganders installation.
It is possible to name many pieces of recent visual art that place stress
on blurred landscape views in various ways. A pioneer in this contemporary
trend is Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), who made his first blurred landscape
paintings in 1968 (Korsica, 1968; Seascape, 1969). He chose a distant
point of view, across a wide-open plane looking towards the horizon. The
transitions between individual colours are painted with extreme subtlety
and delicacy so that ultimately, a transparent veil is laid over the distant
landscape motifs, which also cut the viewer off from the landscape scenery.
Although Richters working methods and processes are highly sophisticated
and complicated, his blurred landscape images are often connected to the
rhetoric of the sublime manifested in German Romantic painting.5 This is
partly because of Richters own interest in German Romanticism and in
Caspar David Friedrichs work.
Nevertheless, the similarities between the landscapes of these two
artists betray important differences. Dietmar Elger (2007) argues that it is
the use of mechanical mediums of reproduction that separates Richter from
Friedrichs unobstructed view of nature. Richter has made the mediation of
vision his subject matter. Antas has also been immersed in technologically-
mediated images. Therefore, images by these artists, which focus on the
landscapes atmosphere, give us the chance to see the landscape, but also
make it impossible to see the landscape transparently (Elger 2007, 22022).

5
Richter painted his landscapes from photographs.
The Disappearance of Gravity 279

Today, it has become acceptable to understand the sublime historically


and to study how the sublime object has changed over the course of time.
The crucial shift in this understanding occurred after the Second World
War when the sublime changed from being the power of raw nature, which
according to Immanuel Kant overwhelmed our faculty of imagination and
rendered it helpless, to the power of man-made disasters, which followed
the horrors caused by the two world wars. Gene Ray (2007, 12) defines
raw nature beyond the human as the first nature and societys self-made
disasters as the second nature.
The cultural theoretician David Nye (1994) has charted the notion of
the technological sublime in America. He argues that, during the nineteenth
century, technology replaced the Kantian natural sublime defined by the
concept of first nature. In the 1960s Theodor W. Adorno insisted that the
natural sublime was only a passing phase in European aesthetic thinking
(Adorno 2002). Two decades later Fredric Jameson (1991) suggested that
the natural sublime should be replaced by the notion of second nature.
Gene Ray (2007) takes the idea further to posit a third nature:
And to bring this right up to date, I would argue that global climate change,
rogue storms and tsunamis, and all the other extreme weather events
and ecological disasters now looming over the horizon hardly change this
inescapability of the social. For if these new disasters are the result of
cumulative human impacts, then they dont represent any simple return of
the old first nature. They would be the product of a dialectic between first
and second nature: in short a third nature. (Ray 2007, 11)

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

the emotions awakened by infinity and the immensity of nature or about


the menace of the breakdown of the subject in the natural world. On
the contrary, contemporary works focus our attention on the mundane
element of air on which we all depend. Compared to the romantic notion
of the immanence of subjectivity and of the sublime arising from inner
experience, in these contemporary airy artworks the sublime comes from
the surface itself.
The works are not about the artists emotions. Rather than expressing
their creators emotions or inner affects, the works are making observations
about the world. That is why I call these atmospheric works empiricist in
the sense that the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour (2004; 2010)
uses the notion of second or radical empiricism. Latour separates second
empiricism from first empiricism, British empiricism or Logical empiricism
on the strength of how the facts are understood and formulated. The problem
with first empiricism is that it has restricted experiences to the object without
relations or connections (Latour 2010, 82). Second empiricism searches for
significant connections between human and non-human things and between
the natural and the social and explores the relationships between what is
known and what is imparted through experience. Its aim is to uncover the
connections between different things instead of ascertaining facts. In other
words, second empiricism explores things with a realistic attitude and asks
us to approach things not as they are in themselves, namely, as unrelated
facts or immanent inwardness, but rather as things act together in an open
network (Latour, 2010, 8283; 2004, 231).
In art the empiricist and realistic tendency manifests itself in two ways.
First, it appears at the material level of the work, and second, it appears
in the spatial conditions of the installations. The material and spatial
conditions are realised by activating the haptic vision as occurs in the video
installation Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht (2002) by the Finnish artist Heli
Rekula. Rekulas video is a nineteen-minute long freehand shot, shown as
a loop format in the exhibition space.6 The work was filmed with a small
digital camera on an island in Ireland. In it, we see the sea, the sky and an
adjacent rocky island called An Tiaracht. Sometimes a flock of birds flies
across the sky. Now and then the scene fills with a veil of fog. (see plate
132)
According to Laura U. Marks (2000), haptic visuality is different
from optical or normal visuality, where one sees things from a distance

6
Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht was exhibited at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary
Art, in Helsinki, Finland, in 2012.
The Disappearance of Gravity 281

to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space. Haptic visuality is


based on the intimacy between the viewer and the moving image, and it
does not imply mastery over the things seen, as does optical visuality. In
haptic vision the pleasurable gaze tends to move across the surface plane
of the image (Marks 2000, 162). Rekulas work partly sustains the optical
visuality that plunges into illusionistic depth, but the depiction of sky and
heaven disturbs the optical perspective representation. In the video the
image of the sky occasionally filled with drifting fog and the abstract and
material ground of the image merged (Johansson 2010, 196213).
Both Rekulas Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht and Axel Antass Whiteout
(Fence) generate a movement between the haptic and the optic in the
viewing experience. The misty air that moves the vision across the surface
of the image catches the eye of the viewer, but every now and again the eye
is forced towards the distant landscape, thus offering a kind of movement
between haptic and optic visuality (Johansson 2010). As Marks (2000: xii
xvi, 13) argues, in the end haptic visuality identifies the viewer and the
object of viewing, which leads to materialistic deatha revocation of
the differences between things. For that reason optical visuality is needed
to create balance and dialogue between surface and depth, haptic and optic.
This dialogue is supposed to lead to a new, democratic representation.
According to Marks (ibid.), this movement between optic and haptic vision
is a pre-condition for an ethical vision that serves life.

The Roundness of Being

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard devoted the last chapter of The
Poetics of Space (1994, orig. La Potique de lEspace, 1958) to pure
phenomenology or maximum phenomenological purity. In order to
attain phenomenological purity we must recognise the primitivism of
certain images of being and use them. According to Bachelard (1994, 234),
there are images of full roundness that help us to collect ourselves and to
confirm our being intimately, inside. After this experience of inside, being
cannot be anything other than round, he argues. In the works of writers and
artists Bachelard found connections with his own thoughts.7 He pursued an
experience of roundness, not as a shape of any object or geometrical entity,
but as a phenomenologically round experience, and he ascribed many

7
According to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, every being seems in itself round while
Vincent van Gogh argued that life is probably round (Bachelard 1994, 23435).
282 Johansson

characteristics to roundness. For him, roundness was a perfect geometrical


form of cosmological dimensions, a space bounded by the contours of the
earth, the shape of the skies above and the experience of the interiority of
being-in-the-world (Bachelard 1994, 2345).
Many of the images Bachelard used in his texts have a connection to the
phenomena in the sky and the atmosphere. The image of a bird is a perfect
example (Bachelard 1994, 23740). This roundness of the atmosphere is
emphasised in two short films, Rome Drive I (2006) and Rome Drive II
(2006) by the Finnish artist Lauri Astala (see plates 133 and 134). In the
first film the camera has captured random views across Rome. Among the
recurring themes are shadows and views from the hills over the rooftops
of the city and the countless cupolas rising amongst them. The different
images are pulled together by repeated views of flocks of birds in the sky.
The birds in flight create patterns, coming together and then dispersing
again. They provide the core of the films roundness and are comparable
to the poetic images in Rainer Maria Rilkes poem, Anxiousness, which
Bachelard takes up in his book. There the cry of the bird opens the orbit of
being towards the spheres and turns the sky into a cupola.
This round bird-call
Rests in the instant that engenders it
Huge as the sky above the withered forest
Docilely things take their place in this call
In it the entire landscape seems to rest.8
(Bangnis, translated by Maria Jolas) (cited in Bachelard 1994, 238)

Astalas other film, Rome Drive II, more minimal than the artists previous
work, was shot from a single point on Romes Janiculum Hill. We see Rome
as a skyline glimpsed through a thick veil of fog. The view is obstructed by
the fog as if it were teasing the viewer by hiding the eternal city in its misty
arms, which one can almost touch. Two large cupolas can be discerned in the
haptic image, and in brighter moments the fog lifts and the outlines of houses
become visible. Cupolas have often been considered the highest achievement
of architecture. A cupola is a combination of spatial roundness and height,
thereby bringing the sky into a building. According to Peter Sloterdijk (2005,
237), traditional cupolas had exactly that functionto bring the sky into the

8
Und dennoch ruht der runde Vogelruf
in dieser Weile, die ihn schuf,
breit wie ein Himmel auf dem welken Walde.
Gefgig rumt sich alles in den Schrei:
Das ganze Land scheint lautlos drin zu liegen,
The Disappearance of Gravity 283

umbrella-shaped interior under the protection of which man could be safe.


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

Figure 135. Lauri Astalas Gamelan (2010). Photograph Lauri Astala.


284 Johansson

Gamelan offers us a complicated spatial structure. The film is exhibited so


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

Installations against Gravity

Another empiricist tendency of contemporary atmospheric works


becomes apparent when we turn our focus to installation art. The different
representational strategies give way to a mutual encounter and a sharing
of space with other viewers and to a background that emerges into the
foreground. In this context excellent examples to introduce us to the third
hybrid nature are the atmospheric installations by the Danish-Icelandic
artist Olafur Eliasson.
In his oeuvre, which is abundant, Eliasson has repeatedly emphasised
the changed relationship between nature and culture or between the natural
and the technological. In many of his installations the so-called natural
phenomena have been transferred from outdoors to indoors, to within well-
guarded art spaces. The example I want to discuss here is The Weather
Project (20034), which was displayed at the Tate Modern in London. The
work consisted of several parts, including an interview survey of Londoners
everyday relationship to weather and advertisements with weather slogans,
which were distributed in various public places in London.
The most noticeable part of the work was an installation in Turbine
Hall, where the climate of London was created in the exhibition space.
The representation of an artificial sun and sky dominated the expanse of
Turbine Hall. The artificial inside climate was constructed with the help of
technology so that the huge hall was transformed into an odd atmospheric
space with soft light and air. Mist permeated the interior space and looked
The Disappearance of Gravity 285

as if it were creeping in from outside, although it was only puffing in


from the walls. The mist accumulated into a cloud-like formation before
dissipating across the hall. At the end of the hall was a huge semi-circular
form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The semi-circular
arc was reflected overhead so that in the vision of the viewers it became
a complete sun. The mono-frequency lamps used in the work emit light
at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are
invisible (May 2003). The viewers seemed to love wandering around in this
artificial climatic space.
In an article entitled Atmosphre, Atmosphre published in the
catalogue of The Weather Project, Bruno Latour (2003) compared Olafur
Eliasson to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. According to Latour,
what Sloterdijk does in philosophy, Eliasson does in his art. They both
ignore the divisions between wild and domesticated, private and public,
technical and organic, and replace them with expanded meteorological
experiments, in which they focus on air conditioning and pay attention
to envelopes, spheres, encounters and ambiences (ibid., 30). Latour was
here referring to Peter Sloterdijks spherology, developed in what the
philosopher calls his magnum opus, Sphren (19942004). Sphren is a
study of the challenges to contemporary mans being-in-the-world, a study
which Sloterdijk develops through three metaphors of different spatial
states: the bubble, the sphere and foam.
Sloterdijk was working on Sphren in the 1990s when there was a
topological turn in cultural theory, but he states that only later did he
recognise how his work was connected to the work of contemporaries
around the world. He mentions thinkers like Homi Bhabha and Edward S.
Casey, but also the installation artist Ilya Kabakov and the architect Frei
Otto. Whereas many of these topological theoreticians use notions like
space, place, dwelling, locality and territory, which allude to solid ground
and habitation on earth, Sloterdijks decision has been to use the old word
sphere, which stems from Aristotles thinking (Funcke 2005).
Conscious of Bachelards reflections on roundness and further
influenced by phenomenology, Sloterdijk wanted to restore shared and
spatial being to humanity after the modern age of individualism. This
became the central purpose of his spherology, which stems from the idea
of a fundamentally communal and local humanity. Being human is always
a local matter, being together with and around others, with individuals
continually intertwining. This being together, which the modern age
has sought to conceal, starts in the embryo, which shares its space with
the mother, its shell and the placenta. Although Sloterdijk is somewhat
286 Johansson

concerned about the urological associations of the expression bubble, as


well as about the fugitive images that we associate with soap bubbles, air
bubbles and speech bubbles, which are non-signifying and non-substantial,
his point is to dissolve the metaphysics of substance and of isolated
individual things; according to him, these are representations which, for
2500 years, have blinded Europeans by placing a grammatical mirage over
what is called the hard kernel of the real (Sloterdijk 2007, 13839).
The principal task of Sloterdijks spherology is to bring human
beings back to the shared spatial existence after the individualism and
spacelessness of modern times and find a new vocabulary to define human
conditions that will reflect the experience of lightness and relationships.
This, believes Sloterdijk, is the challenge of our age. For centuries,
philosophical language and critical thinking have interpreted lightness
as appearance and heaviness as essence. Today, however, the heavy has
become the appearance and the essential dwells in lightness, in the air and
in the atmosphere. Sloterdijk encapsulated this argument when he wrote:
Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would
say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity (Funcke
2005).
The fascination of artists with misty spaces corresponds to Sloterdijks
thinking because such works emphasise that air is not only light, almost
without gravity, but also an in-between element, which gathers things
together and makes appearance possible. This argument becomes even
more apparent in the misty installations by the English sculptor Antony
Gormley and the Finnish artist Tanja Koponen. Gormleys work, Blind
Light (2007), was made by and presented at the artists solo show at the
Hayward Gallery in London. The installation consisted of an eight-by
ten-metre luminous glass enclosure filled with a dense artificial cloud that
reduced visibility to about half a metre. The room was inside the larger
exhibition hall so that the viewers could both see the space from outside
and also enter it. Those who entered the vaporous space were visible only
as traces or shadows on the glass wall to those looking in from the outside.
On the inside, the viewer was entirely enveloped by bright light and cloud.
Being inside Blind Light felt like being lost in a thick mist at the top of a
mountain. Thus immersed, the viewer became an integral part of the work
(Hubbard 2007).
The Disappearance of Gravity 287

Figure 136. Tanja Koponens Unsaid II. Photograph Tanja Koponen.

The installation Unsaid II (Sanomaton II) (2007) by Tanja Koponen was


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

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

Conclusion

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

9
Sloterdijk addresses the artificiality of air and the means that human beings have
developed to use air for an atmo-terrorism, like poison gas as a weapon of mass
destruction in his book Terror from the Air (2009).
The Disappearance of Gravity 289

gives out and the foggy air turns our attention to the act of breathing and to
air-conditioning. Simply by focusing on the element of air repositions the
viewer in the environment (Bal 2007, 15858; 17677).
All these installations of spatial being focus our attention on two things.
Firstly, on what is self-evident, mundane and necessary: the air that we
breathe is the first and the last of our life-support systems; secondly, on
the shared, affective space that the works create around them. The foggy
installations as well as Ganders I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise
(The Invisible Pull) discussed in the beginning of this chapter constitute a
kind of momentary community.
These images and films produce images of air that disturb our vision,
but they also bring the surface of the photography or film close to the
viewer, to the shared space. In this sense installations proceed even further
than photographs and films, because they break down the representation,
entwine the beholder in a strange fog and transform the artwork into
suddenly being in a shared space. Fernando March writes about Gormleys
Blind Light: The visitors were thus transformed and contemplated each
other as if they were sculptural elements (March 2009, 87). I would argue
instead that those who participate in these installations are transformed,
not by regarding each other as sculptural elements, but as co-inhabitants of
common air-conditioning, as if air were the only democratic link between
human beings.

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Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces
of a Renaissance Magus

Lauri Ockenstrm

At the dawn of the sixteenth century a young German humanist, Cornelius


Agrippa, described the principles of astrological magic in the following
way:
Such is the magnitude, virtue and power of the celestials that not only
natural things but also artificial things, when appropriately exposed to
superiors, are easily subjected to the most powerful agent and miraculous
life, which perpetually bestows upon them wonderful celestial virtue.
Thus, the magicians confirm that not only the applicable mixtures of natural
things, but also images, symbols, rings, mirrors and other favourable
instruments are able to catch the celestial illustration and receive certain
astonishing things. The animated, living and sensitive rays of celestial
bodies bear miraculous gifts and ardent powers within themselves, and
imprint miraculous virtues on a single moment and with a sudden touch on
images and also less apt materials. Ptolemy says in the Centiloquium that
inferior beings obey the celestials, and not only them, but also their images;
terrestrial scorpions obey not only the celestial Scorpio, but also the images
of that Scorpio.1 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.35)

1
I am using Vittoria Perrone Compagnis edition, De occulta philosophia libri
tres (1992). Tanta est coelestium magnitudo, virtus et potestas quod non solun
res naturales, verum etiam artificiales, quando superis rite sunt expositae, subito
patiuntur ab agente potentissimo vitaque mirabili, quae ipsis virtutem coelestem saepe
mirificam largitur. Sic magi non modo mixtione et applicatione rerum naturalium,
sed etiam imaginibus, sigillis, annulis, speculis et quibusque aliis instrumentis
opportunis coelestem quandam illustrationem capi et mirandum aliquod suscipi
posse confirmant. Coelestium enim corporum radii animati, vivi, sensuales, dotes
mirificas potentiamque vehementissimam secum ferentes, etiam repentino momento
ac subito tactu mirabiles in imaginibus imprimuntur viresetiam in materia minus
apta inquit Ptolomaeus in Centiloquio quod res inferiores obediunt coelestibus
non solum illis, sed etiam earum imaginibus: sicut non solum scorpiones terreni
obediunt Scorpioni coelesti, sed etiam imagini Scorpioni illius. All translations
are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
294 Ockenstrm

Although focused on astrological magic, Agrippas excerpt reveals


essential features about Renaissance magic and the Renaissance worldview
at a more general level. Magical powers filled and controlled the space,
and spatial magical influences, such as astral rays, were supposedly able
to travel great distances, permeate considerable physical obstacles and
penetrate hard materials such as metal and stone, transforming the universe
into a huge magical engine. The spatial network was established and made
possible through certain ostensible analogies, for instance, the rudimentary
similarity between the constellation of Scorpio, the species called scorpion
and a picture displaying a scorpion. Together these different entities which
shared the form of a scorpion as a common denominator were supposed
to establish invisible, yet physically significant connections and nullify the
distances between different corners of the universe.
As irrational as this might appear to a modern reader steeped in present-
day scientific thought, Agrippas outpouring is quite characteristic of
pre-Cartesian philosophising and intellectually curious minds. In the pre-
modern magical worldview, which was more or less loosely connected with
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy and the hierarchies of (Neo-)
Platonist metaphysics, the relations of space and place, the apprehension
of distances and the habits of perceiving spatial dimensions differed
drastically from later, more rational and objective conventions of space
perception, which emphasise features such as measurability and realistic
expression of three dimensions.
But how did a magical worldviewor way of perceivingcontribute
to the notions of space and place and to the objects and agents within space
and place? In other words, how was the magical space constructed and how
did it work? In this paper I explore these issues through the writings of
two influential Renaissance authors, each of whom left a remarkable trace
both on the evolution of natural philosophy and on Western esotericism.
The first author is the aforementioned Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (14861535), whose major work, De occulta philosophia (Of
Occult Philosophy), written before 1510, revised and printed in 153133,
has often been considered one of the most far-reaching, dangerous and
liberal compendia of magic and the occult sciences ever written (e.g.
Walker 1958, 9396). The other important writer is Marsilio Ficino (1433
99), a Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, astrologer and translator, who
introduced new, Hellenistic esoteric sources such as Iamblichus and The
Corpus Hermeticum to the Latin West and who, in his De vita libri tres
(Three books on life, printed in 1489), presented the idea of natural magic
based on theorems of Hellenistic and scholastic science.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 295

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

Magical Spaces and Worlds: Analogies and Associations

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

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

2
For the history of medieval magic and further literature, see e.g. Weill-Parot 2002
and Boudet 2006.
3
For a detailed list of treatises presenting damnable and detestable images, see e.g.
Weill-Parot 2002, 4160.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 297

upwards, sometimes downwards; sometimes they are put in boiling water,


and sometimes in fire.4 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.49)

The effects can be catastrophic:


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

The excerpt demonstrates that Agrippa was profoundly acquainted


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

modern world. Brian Vickers, for example, has argued that the occult
disciplines such as alchemy, astrology and magic formed a consistent
system with a limitless capacity to absorb new elements. According to
Vickers, these processes of transformation were based on arbitrarily created
correspondences between divergent elements found in man and the cosmos
(Vickers 1988, 26566). William Ashworth, in turn, has talked about
emblematic thought, by which he means the willingness to comprehend
reality through symbols and resemblances. This attitude, he argues, was
based on the mystical belief that every single thing, whether plants, animals,
stones or whatever, had an endless number of secret meanings and invisible
connections called universal correspondences (Ashworth 1990, 312).
Despite certain differences Vickers and Ashworth draw some similar
conclusions, two of which deserve special attention: firstly, the associative
plurality and limitlessness of meanings as a method of (re)grouping, and
secondly, resemblance and analogy as basic principles of reconstructing
spatial interrelationships. The term associative limitlessness brings
readily to mind Umberto Ecos provocative and probably deliberately
anachronistic suggestions about postmodern Hermetic culture,6 where
fixed meanings have made way for the boundless plurality of limitless
interpretations, and the dead author has lost control of his text (Eco 1994,
3440). Despite its controversial argument, Ecos polemic offered a useful
starting point for Barbara Staffords analysis of visual analogy, one of the
most comprehensive attempts to connect the emblematic-occult-associative
attitude with the development of the arts and visual culture. Stafford
emphasises the concept of analogy, which, as an historical phenomenon,
she divides into the Aristotelian concept of the harmony of mathematical
proportions and the Platonic theory of participation. Both, she claims, are
inherently visual (Stafford 1999, 23, 8). She defines the tendency to apply

6
Anachronistic in the sense that historical Hermetism never contained the principle
of limitless interpretation. In addition Ecos argument of the strong connection
between scientific thought and Hermeticism, which historiography has shown
(Eco 1994, 34) is probably based on the so-called Yates thesis, had been questioned
already by 1994. (See Vickers 1988, 280, 288, and Copenhaver 1990.) The pioneers
of scientific thought, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, certainly knew
Hermetic texts, but Frances Yates s claim (repeated by Eco) that the Hermetic
model contributed to the birth of modern scientific rationalism is untenable
(unless Eco sees scientific rationalism in a very peculiar way). In his writing Eco
deliberately exaggerates the importance of Hermetism and reshapes it limitlessly
and associatively according to his own purposes, perhaps in order to fool the
reader.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 299

analogies as dialectics attempting to bridge the seen and the unseen, the
known and the unknown, which happens by perceiving the similarity in
differencesuch as scorpions and other terrestrial figures in the firmament
of the night sky, to use a simple example (Stafford 1999, 89).
Staffords rich, diversified and multidisciplinary analysis, which
actually is an upgraded variant of Goodmans theory of making worlds
by visualising the unseen through discernible things (e.g. Goodman
1978, 1014), forms, I believe, a useful firmament for exploring and re-
evaluating Renaissance magic and its capacities for spatial interplay in the
pre-Copernican theories. Below, I shall examine how this analogy works
in constructing different spatial interactions in the hierarchically structured
pre-modern universe.

Inhabitants of Superior Spaces


and the Doctrine of Three Worlds

Stafford argues that the long-term prevalence of analogous thought (he


considers Leibniz to be the last notorious representative of the tradition)
was essentially based on primordial psychological needs to recognise
the unknown and to possess the not-yet-possessed. These needs (or
facilities) originate, if we are to believe recent hypotheses in the field of
neuropsychology, in the structure of our sensory organs and predominantly
automatic mechanisms of our brain.7 In other words, when we are
constructing our personal vision of the world, the properties and functional
models of the mind (and of language as well)for example, tendencies to
observe order in disorder and classify things in categoriesare transferred
to the exterior reality and seen as fundamental parts of its structure. This
process of projecting the operative models of inner reality onto the exterior
space might be used to explain the analogy-based reasoning of medieval
and Renaissance scholars. For them, the harmonies observed throughout
creation were not products of any cultural behaviour or neurobiological
needs; on the contrary, analogies were seen as parts of the very essence
of the universe, its divine order and its absolute hierarchies. Under these

7
Stafford pays more attention to this in her The Remaining 10 percent, in which
she suggests that the associative jump to connect resembling, not identical,
formal features is enabled because of the deep neurophysiological correspondence
between the phenomenal and noumenal systems (Stafford 2007, 38). See also
Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999.
300 Ockenstrm

circumstances it was an obvious choice to populate heavenly spheres


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

By imaginable forms Ficino is referring to the faces of the zodiacal signs,


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

8
I have used the edition and translation by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, 1998
(1989).
9
For further information on decans, see Weill-Parot, 2002, 1089. The most
important iconographical sources for the decans used were the Picatrix, 2.11 and
Albumasars Introductorium, 6.12.
10
I have used the edition of David Pingree (1986): in secunda facie Tauri vir
similis figure cameli, et in eius digitis ungulas habens similes vaccinis, et ipse
totus coopertus linteamine fracto. in secunda facie Geminorum vir cuius vultus
est similis aquile, et eius caput panno linteo opertum; lorica plumbea indutus et
munitus, et in eius capite galeam ferream, supra quam est corona serica . . . in
secunda facie Cancri mulier Formosa vultu, et in eius capite myrti viridis coronam
habens, et in eius manu perticam arboris que dicitur nenufar, et ipsa cantilenas
amoris et leticie cantans.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 301

These kinds of astrological images, including stellar personifications,


were supposed to attract certain astral influences. The human-like, but
invisible heavenly godheads described were allocated in the sphere of
fixed stars, which still belonged to the physical world, but this habit of
depicting idealised invisible entities in visible forms also alludes to the
highest level of existence, the transcendental world. That mysterious
hereafter was regarded as the birthplace of existence and the place of
residence of exemplary forms by most of the pre-modern intellectual and
religious traditions. In Christian theology all of the terrestrial creatures had
a counterpart in the hereafter and stood for other, mysterious meanings
familiar from Christian allegories; in Platonic thought they were reflections
of the eternal, ideai dwelling in the mind of God, while in Aristotelian
natural philosophy, individuals stood for a species and a substantial form
that, of course, had a divine origin.
The three-fold distinction into terrestrial, heavenly and transcendent
levels of being has sometimes been called the doctrine of three worlds,
that is, three grades of being in which the same forms are repeated in
taxonomically ordered chains. The doctrine, sometimes attributed to
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or Agrippa (e.g. Gombrich 1972, 15253;
Newman and Grafton 2001, 16), was inherent in the Ptolemaic system
and perhaps had its brightest manifestation in Procluss late classical neo-
platonic metaphysics, where a huge variety of divinities was scattered
throughout the mundane, cosmic and hyper-cosmic levels. (Saffrey and
Westerink 1968, lxiilxvii) These levels are more commonly called by their
Latin namesterrestrial, celestial and super-celestialin the following
order:

Super-celestial: intelligible beings, ideas, transcendent divinities


Celestial: visible heaven: planets and fixed stars
Terrestrial: an above ground and subterranean world consisting
of elements

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

to nine celestial spheres, connected respectively to nine orders of terrestrial


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

Transcendent Cosmic level Mundane Mundane trees


level (angels) minerals & plants
Seraphim fixed stars Salts bushes bearing
fruits
Cherubim Saturn Lead cypress
Thrones Jupiter copper lemon
Dominations Mars Iron oak
Virtues Sun Gold lotus, laurel
Powers Venus Tin myrtle
Principalities Mercury quicksilver apple tree
Archangels Moon Silver bladder senna
Angels Earth sulphur shrubberies

Table 141. The universal correspondences according to Athanasius


Kircher.

The idea of chains of correspondences was the basic axiom of the


astrological magic of the Renaissance: Every stone, metal, animal, herb and
even every bodily member had connections to a certain planet and zodiacal
sign. By using the herbs and stones as astrologers suggested, it was possible
to gain benefits from the heavens. To enjoy solar properties, for example,
one had simply to wear a laurel wreath; to profit from Jupiter, one had to
eat some lemon.
In astrological literature these series were not always limited to fixed
groups of seven or nine. Ficino, who offered one of the fullest accounts of
these chains, classified silver, jacinth, topaz, coral, crystal, beryl, spodium,
sapphire, green and airy colours, wine, sugar, white honey, lamb, peacock,
eagle, young bullock, and sanguine, handsome and venerable men in the
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 303

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

Imaginary Spaces and Manipulated Places

For a Renaissance magus imaginary spaces were real, while real spaces
were in turn shaped by the imagination. Transcendent worlds which we
regard as abstractions and intellectual constructions were considered real,
in fact, more real than the visible terrestrial world. At the same time the
discernible realm was not taken to be what it looked like: Visible reality
was filled with occult properties, astral radiation, demonic creatures and
other invisible, yet tremendously powerful forces. Neither was the visible
reality fixed or untouchable: A magus was able to comprehend, grasp,
reshape and manipulate his environment, both visible and invisible, by

11
Ficino explains this more explicitly in De vita 3.16. Following the guidelines
of medieval philosophy, he suggests that all species and material substances have
elemental manifest qualities and hidden occult qualities (virtutes occultae) that
originate from the heavens. A useful source for further reading on this issue is
Copenhaver 1984.
304 Ockenstrm

means of imagination and spirits, his intellect and natural magic.


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

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

12
Commentary on Platos Symposium on Love, English translation by Sears Jayne
(1985).
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 305

Usually, the spirits affected other human beings, but other living
objects, such as animals, plants, demons and higher souls, produced spirits
as well and were afflicted by them. Actually, the whole universe was filled
with spirits, and even dead matter was not safe from the spiritual arrows of
sight. In his early work De amore (On Love), Ficino recites a pseudo-
Aristotelian legend in which a menstruating woman can soil a mirror with
bloody drops by means of her own gaze. This is possible, he explains,
because the subtle spirits sink into soft and less dense materials such as
cloth or wood, while hard materials, like stones or mirrors, stop the spirit
on the surface and draw them together, giving the impression of sanguinary
re-incarnation (Ficino, De amore, 7.4).
As these examples indicate, for a Renaissance magus the environment
was not only comprehensible, but also controllable and changeable through
imagination and such physical acts as staring. Higher powers of the human
soul, reason and especially the intellect offered still more influential
instruments for surpassing physical distances. Through the contemplative
skills of the intellect, for example, the human soul was able to reach
transcendent reality and comprehend divine mysteries in an instant of
revelation. That kind of contemplative gnosis was one of the cornerstones
of both Christian and Neoplatonic mysticism, but Ficino reformed the
tradition by giving it a strong flavour of worldliness. For him, the ability
to reach the hereafter was a sign of mans divine virtue, his (super)celestial
origin and godlike dominion over the lower creation:
In justice only a celestial animal delights in the celestial element [fire]:
with heavenly power he ascends and measures the heavens; and with
his superheavenly mind he transcends the heavens.13 (Ficino, Theologia
Platonica 13.3.3, transl. Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden)

Furthermore, God is everywhere and is always. But man longs to be


everywhere. For he uses the four elements, as we said. He measures the
earth and the sky, and he examines the hidden depths of Tartarus. To him the
sky does not appear superlatively highto use Mercuriuss14 wordsnor
deep the center of the earth. The intervals of time and place do not prevent
him from coursing through all that exists in whatever time or place. No
wall blocks or checks his gaze; no boundaries suffice for him. He studies to

13
The citations from the Theologia Platonica are taken from James Hankinss
edition, translated by Michael J. B. Allen, 20016.
14
Mercurius refers to a text of a mythical pseudo-author, Hermes Trismegistos.
The whole passage was probably inspired by Hermetic exemplars, especially the
Asclepius 6.
306 Ockenstrm

rule everywhere, everywhere to be praised. And thus he strives to be, like


God, everywhere. (Ficino, Theologia Platonica 14.5.1, transl. Michael J. B.
Allen and John Warden)

In Ficinos vision an enlightened human mind was able to transcend the


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

Instrument Planet/Divinity
understanding (intelligentiae) Saturnus
(highest)
reason (Rationis humanae discursiones) Jupiter
concepts of the imagination (Conceptus Mars
imaginationis: formae, motus, affectae)
sounds (Voces: verba, cantus, soni) Apollo / Sun
powders and vapours (Pulveres & vapores) Venus
plants and animals (quae ex herbis & animalium Mercurius
membris componuntur)
hard materials: stones and metals (Duriores: Lapides, Luna / Moon
metalla) (lowest)

Table 142. The seven steps of magic according to Marsilio Ficino.


Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 307

Ficinos systematised theory of magic had a great impact on debates about


magic over the following decades. Almost all authors of magic discussed
and quoted Ficinos De vita, either applying its theorems or denying them
or just transmitting the content forwards. Sometimes De vita was also
reshaped and refined: Cornelius Agrippa, who usually followed the text of
his great predecessor quite precisely, nevertheless made some remarkable
additions to Ficinos exposition of the seven steps of magic. Ficino had
placed images in the lowest category (probably in order to make his
magic appear innocent) amongst the hard materials, but Agrippa separates
visual marks into an independent group and places them at the top of the
hierarchy: The eighth grade, the sphere of fixed stars, belongs to images
and rings, while the ninth grade, the heaven of the primus mobile, belongs
to numbers, figures and characters (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 3.46).
The tendency to appreciate images and shapes can already be found,
albeit in a more modest tone, in Ficino, who was more cautious about the
dangers of magical images and their connections to illicit magic. (Walker
1958, 9596) Nevertheless, both Ficino and Agrippa emphasise the power
of images, figures and forms as a means of communicating with celestial
and super-celestial souls and attracting stellar influences. Images, when
properly made, had a direct connection to pure forms and ideas, which,
perceived as intelligible beings, were able to recognise themselves
in earthly objects. (Ficino, De vita 3.16) This theurgic magic, which
directly invokes divine souls, transcends the limits of natural magic and
was totally illicit from the Christian point of view. It was, however, based
on the semi-philosophical neo-platonic doctrines and Hellenistic esoteric
sources greatly appreciated by Ficino and Agrippa, who seemingly were
too fascinated by the possibilities of theurgy to be able to avoid the subject.
The doctrines of theurgy were transmitted to Ficino (and by him
to Agrippa) via late classical esoteric sources such as Iamblichuss De
mysteriis Aegyptiorum (Jamblique 1966) and a pseudo-Zoroastrian
collection known as Chaldaean Oracles (Majercik 1989). The main
goal was the theurgic union, a direct connection between a magus and
the divinities, which was reached, as Iamblichus often suggests, through
holy and secret symbols.15 At the highest level the contacts between the
earthly world and the deities were not created by iconic representations and
personification (which was the case with heavenly bodies), but by pure
shapes, such as mathematical ideas and mysterious characters, which
are often regarded as the only way to express pure intelligence by earthly

15
E.g. De mysteriis 1.21, 3.31, 4.2, 6.6, 8.7.
308 Ockenstrm

means (e.g. De occulta philosophia 2.22). The latter group, characteres (or
karakteres), which Renaissance authors often confused with hieroglyphs,
consisted of vague medieval signs and symbols of Arabic origin, familiar
from manuscripts on magic listed in the Speculum (figures 141 and 142).
The real characters were considered, as Agrippa testifies, as a divine
language that only the gods could read properly:

Characters are nothing but unknown letters and scriptures that are
protecting the sacred names of gods and spirits from the use and reading by
the profane. The ancients called them hieroglyphs or sacred letters because
they were devoted to sacred divinities only...
On this matter, Porphyrios says that the ancients, when they wanted
to conceal godly and divine powers, signified invisible things with sensible
figures and visible things, as if they had recounted great mysteries with
sacred letters and unfolded them with symbolic figures. (Agrippa, De
occulta philosophia 3.29)16

16
Sunt autem characters nihil aliud quam ignorabiles quaedam literae et scripturae,
sacra deorum et spirituum nomina a prophanorum usu lectioneque custodientes,
quas literas veteres hieroglyphicas sive sacras vocabant, quia solis deorum sacris
devotas. . . . Unde Porphyrius ait veteres, deum et divinas virtutes celare volentes,
per sensibiles figuras et per ea quae visibilia sunt invisibilia significantes, quasi
sacris literis magna mysteria tradidisse et symbolicis quibusdam figuris explicasse.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 309

Figures 141 and 142. Planetary symbols and astrological characters. De


occulta philosophia libri tres, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheym.
Helsinki, The National Library of Finland, The manuscript collection.

Spaces and Places of a Magician

When and where was magic practised? There is a great lacuna in our
knowledge about learned magic. There are many testimonies about witch
trials in which the suspected, usually uneducated peasants and illiterate
common people were accused of using simple wax figurines and elementary
curse formulas. The practices of learned magic described by Ficino and
Agrippa, however, have been more or less concealed from posterity as
have their material remnants, such as astrological images.17 Fortunately,
textual evidence offers some valuable clues. There was, for example,
a rich variety of instruments for catching magical influences, such as in
Ficinos table of seven steps and Agrippas nine grades, which included

Modern research has been able to recognise with certainty only a few medieval
17

magical amulets. See, for example, Weill-Parot 1999, 893.


310 Ockenstrm

material, ritual and intellectual ways of attracting the heavenly benefits.


The authors also agreed that the more instruments were used, the more
efficient the magic would be.18 In the ideal case the magus was supposed
to combine all possible instruments in a single ritual in one physical place.
That kind of accumulation of magical means would gather all imaginable
magical streams in one place at a given time, thereby providing the ritual
with absolute power (Ficino, De vita 3.16, see also note 21). There is one
interesting account describing this kind of total ceremony in the writings
of Ficinos disciple Francesco Cattani da Diacceto (14661522). In his
detailed report, to which D. P. Walker called attention in the 1950s, the
proper astrological timing is combined with proper costume, colours,
herbs, plants, places, furniture, incense, images, symbols, songs, prayers,
unguents, animals and proper disposition of ones own imagination:
If, for example, he [the magus] wishes to acquire solarian gifts, first he sees
that the sun is ascending in Leo or Aries, on that day and in the hour of the
sun. Then, robed in a solarian mantle of a solarian colour, such as gold, and
crowned with a mitre of laurel, on the altar, itself made of solarian material,
he burns myrrh and frankincense, the suns own fumigations, having strewn
the ground with heliotrope and suchlike flowers. Also he has an image of
the sun in gold or chrysolite or carbuncle, that is, of the kind they think
corresponds to each of the suns gifts. If, for example, he wishes to cure
diseases, he has an image of the sun enthroned, crowned and wearing a
saffron cloak, likewise a raven and the figure of the sun, which are to be
engraved on gold when the sun is ascending in the first face of Leo. Then,
anointed with unguents made, under the same celestial aspect, from saffron,
balsam, yellow honey and anything else of that kind, and not forgetting the
cock and the goat, he sings the suns own hymn, such as Orpheus thought
should be sung. . . . To all these he adds what he believes to be the most
important: a strongly emotional disposition of the imagination, by which,
as with pregnant women, the spirit is stamped with this kind of imprint,
and flying out through the channels of the body, especially through the
eyes, ferments and solidifies, like rennet, the kindred power of the heavens.
(Diacceto, Opera Omnia, quoted in Walker 1958, 3233)

Unfortunately, we have no records to verify whether such rites were ever


performed, but Diaccetos account reveals a great deal about the ideals of
the neo-platonising Italian elite on the subject of magic-religious habits.

18
There is a remarkable ideological change compared to the medieval Christian
authors, who, led by authorities such as the Speculum astronomiae and Thomas
Aquinas, condemned almost all rituals used in magic, including suffumigations and
verbal incantations.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 311

Diacceto also clarifies how ceremonial magic and the condensation of


magical influences streaming from different parts of the universe were
supposed to work. The natural and material auxiliaries used in the ritual,
such as heliotrope, saffron, honey and the cock, contained solar powers,
which were the properties specific to them. These auxiliaries were used
to channel solar radiation to a sacred place, but also to fill the space with
solar spirits and transform the nature of local spiritsand the spirits of the
magus himselfinto a more solar mood.
Other, less material auxiliaries, such as songs, poems, words and images,
not only had spiritual functions, but also mental and intelligible ways of
functioning. Songs, for example, were effective both through their musical
intervals and their texts: The harmonies composed of individual tones
invoked the harmonies of the spheres, and the texts worked like prayers
and magical words, directed possibly to solar demons, angels and other
intelligible beings belonging to the Sun series. Also the personifications of
the solar divinitya crowned man sitting on the throne with an apollonian
bird (raven)19 and the figure of the sun (cf. figure 141), which probably
refers to a symbolic character of the planetinvoked higher, intelligent
beings able to recognise their own forms in lower matter.

Figure 143. The Saturn and Mars on a throne with attributes and symbols.
Albumasar (Albumazar Abalachi), Introductorium in astronomiam
(Venice, 1506). Helsinki, The National Library of Finland, The manuscript
collection, H N. 1925.

19
The description is based on Ficinos account in De vita 3.18: a king on a throne in
a yellow garment and a raven and the form of the Sun. (transl. Carol V. Kaske and
John R. Clark.) Ficino, in turn, had used the Picatrix 2.10 as his most direct model.
312 Ockenstrm

Diaccetos ritual owes a great deal to late classical pagan neo-platonic


sources, such as the writings of Proclus and the solar rituals ascribed to the
last pagan emperor, Iulianus Apostata, but, as D. P. Walker (1958, 36, 61,
8384) has pointed out, it also shares obvious resemblances with Christian
practices. Walker pointed to certain ceremonial habits and instrumental aids,
such as the use of an altar, proper garments, images, consecrated objects (or
relics), songs, prayers, incense and so on. In this sense a Catholic church
with its several chapels, relics, holy images and side altars would appear
to be an ideal magical space and an intensive point of condensation of
spiritual-magical influences. There are in fact some hypotheses suggesting
that sculptures, ornaments and symbols carved in medieval cathedrals were
based on magical traditions of oriental civilisations or other non-Christian
sources and, like their pagan models, served amuletical functions, for
example, protection from evil or bringing good luck (Loewenthal 1978). In
this sense a church building appears to be a semi-intentionally syncretistic
(or, in other words, a broadmindedly Christian) cult centre armed with
dozens of magical symbols and objects derived from various European
and non-European religious and magical traditions. The non-Christian (or
at least, let us say, non-orthodox Christian-Catholic) traditions of magic,
especially popular magic and witchcraft, can be seen as some kind of drop-
outs from the dominating Christian scholasticism, which utilised the same
means as the mother Church to gain benefits. In Ficinos case the drop-
out had become a serious rival with all its philosophising argumentation
and scientific background, which caused the author certain obscure and
poorly-documented troubles with the church,20 but also indicate that he saw
learned magic and Christian dogma as parts of the same universe and a
manifestation of the same natural (and supra-natural) regularities with no
insurmountable contradictions between them.
The sacred space of a church edifice reveals something more about the
beliefs connected to the magical universe, such as, for example, the idea
that spiritual influences (this time both in the medical and the theological
meanings) were capable of piercing material obstacles (such as the walls
and floors of a cathedral) and penetrating closed places. The magical
influencesor to put it another way, the spiritual-like spatial connections
and streamswere not limited to the open air, but also worked, and
worked efficiently indeed, in closed and heavily covered spaces. In

20
In the Apologia attached to his De vita, Ficino claims to have been accused of
heresy because of his magical opus. Unfortunately, there are no further records
about the Ficino vs. Catholic Church controversy.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 313

magical theories this permeability of influences was usually taken for


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

21
See De vita 3.16: . . . the immense size, power, and motion of celestial things
brings it about that all the rays of all the stars penetrate in a moment the mass of
the earth and with consummate ease straight to the center. In the center, as the
Pythagoreans and Platonists would have it, the rays are the strongest, both because
they touch the center perpendiculary on all sides and because they are collected in a
confined space. (Translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark.)
22
Ficinos account is annoyingly confusing and does not offer any exact model.
According to different hypotheses, the figura mundi could have been a portable
amulet, a large painting or an astrological clockwork. See, e.g. Yates 1964, 7578;
Toussaint 2002, 307326.
314 Ockenstrm

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

Although focused on the figura mundi picture, the quotation describes how
a chamber or an entire house could become a locus magicus: Paintings,
statues, decorations, ornaments, architectural proportions and other shapes,
painted and other colours, the materials of the furniture, jewels, mirrors,
house plants, herbs, domestic pets and even songs sung indoors had
magical meanings and powers, and all could be used to attract, channel
and disseminate magical influences to a house and within it. In this sense
a Florentine quattrocento palazzo appears to be the embodiment of the
magical universe in miniature, filled with magical influences, stellar
radiation, occult forces and intertwined co-operative spatial relationships.
Ficinos description might easily appear to be a theoretical ideal case
constructed by a philosopher, but there is also some evidence to indicate
that theories were put into practice. Since the 1960s, there have been
suggestions that certain Renaissance paintings, especially Botticellis
Primaveraknown also as an allegory of springwere inspired by
Ficinos figura mundi description and used for astrological purposes.
Although painted approximately ten years before the publication of De
vita, some of Ficinos letters to Botticellis young patron, Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco de Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificents second cousin),
reveal that Ficino was closely acquainted with these ideas as early as the
1470s (Gombrich 1972, 3663, 7981; Yates 1964, 7578; Ames-Lewis
2002, 32738). Although the attempts to amalgamate Ficinos figura and
Botticellis complex allegory have not been very successfulone can
recognise graces, a few planetary gods and the three universal colours in
Botticellis mystery, but the painting is apparently not an imitation of the
structure of the universe with its celestial spheres and gilded fixed stars
there are still some reasons to assume that the painting was meant to have
magical meaning and that it was used for magical and astrological purposes.
Not only the planetary personifications and colours, but also the rich flora
including herbs, fruits and flowers, many of them forming part of the series
of planets and constellations, can easily be seen as representing the same
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces 315

tradition of magical practices as Ficinos De vita. That today we know that


the Primavera was located in Lorenzo di Pierfrancescos bedroom (Levi
dAncona 1983, 28), exactly as Ficino instructed the figura mundi to be
displayed, means that the Ficinian-astrological interpretation must not be
abandoned yet.

Conclusions

As mentioned at the beginning, the Renaissance worlds were made (as


most worlds are made still today) by reflecting the structures of mind and
language onto exterior reality. In this process visual symbols, signs, marks
and metaphors were not just signs pointing at something else, but efficient
parts of reality itself. They belonged to the worldboth seen and unseen,
both real and imagined. The symbols and signs constructed the world,
acted within it and sustained its spatial relationships. Artificial objects
objects made by ars, human skillparticipated in this universal magical
interplay as equals with the objects of nature. Just as a topaz, a peacock,
or other natural object belonged to the series of Jupiter, so an appropriately
made personification of the planet Jupiter or an adequate symbolic
character recognisable by the heavenly soul could be used to channel jovial
influences into a certain place, household, room, item or person.
The way in which Renaissance authors treated the personifications
used in magic, especially Ficinos planetary amulets and his figura mundi
description, reveals something essential about the power that images,
symbols and other artificial objectsor in more general terms, arthad
in constructing and maintaining spatial networks. Pictures represented
and exposed the higher, invisible reality. They were like windows on
the hereafter, pre-modern web cameras through which a mortal and
earthly being was able to communicate with the highest reality. As Brian
Copenhaver (2007, 15657) has explained, spirit, rays, and figures all
provide physical and cosmological solutions to the problem of action at
a distance. Images brought the ideal down to earth: Through them, the
remote higher reality simultaneously became present in this world and
found its way directly into Florentine bed chambers, healing exhausted
scholars from the scourge of melancholy. For a Renaissance magus, magic
was an omnipresent, universe-piercing force and a vivid and interactive
framework, as part of which the intelligent and imagining human being
reshaped his surroundings by painting, sculpting, constructing, cultivating,
decorating, playing and singingor simply by imagining and staring at it.
316 Ockenstrm

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Contributors

Philipp Demgenski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology


at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include
urban anthropology, the anthropology of space and place and spatial and
social transformation in contemporary urban China. His current research
investigates urban development in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao,
with focus specifically on the issue of urban liveability in the context of
heritage preservation.

Dr Julia Faisst is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Catholic


University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt (Germany). Her fields of interest include
modern and contemporary US literature and visual cultures, architecture
and urban studies, and race and diaspora studies.

Claire Farago is Professor of Early Modern Art, Theory, and Criticism


at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has written and edited
fourteen books and published widely on Leonardo da Vincis writings and
Renaissance art theory, as well as on historiography, critical theory, and
cultural interaction. Her current projects deal with the ethics of scholarship
and the various ways in which art and media function in contemporary
society.

Jason Finch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland and


Lecturer in English Literature at bo Akademi University. His current
book project is a topographical history of London slum writing. His main
research interest is in the relationship between literature and place.

Dr Katja Flt is a postdoctoral researcher in Art History at the University


of Jyvskyl. Her fields of interest include medieval visual culture,
medieval ecclesiastic art in the Nordic countries, liturgy and art, and the
cult of Corpus Christi.

Dr Saija Isomaa is University Lecturer in Finnish Literature at the


University of Tampere. Her research interests include genre theory,
historical poetics and moral emotions in literature.
320 Contributors

Dr Hanna Johansson is an art historian who works as a researcher at the


University of Helsinki. Johanssons areas of expertise are the history and
theory of contemporary art. Her recent interest has been in contemporary
representations of landscape and conceptual changes of the notions of
climate, nature and animals from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Bart Keunen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University


in Belgium. He is co-director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team and has
published books and articles on urban literature and the cultural condition
of modernity. He has also published on genre theory, narrative theory and
Bakhtins chronotope concept.

Angela Locatelli is Professor of English Literature at the University of


Bergamo, and the director of the Doctoral Programme in Euro-American
Literatures. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main research interest
is literary theory. She has written extensively on literary epistemology,
psychoanalysis and semiotics and, mostly recently, has focused on early-
modern literature and culture, modernism and the postmodern novel.

Pirjo Lyytikinen is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of


Helsinki and the director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary
Studies. She is an expert on Finnish national romanticism and symbolism.
Her theoretical interests centre on genres of literary world-making.

Lauri Ockenstrm is doctoral student in Art History at the University of


Jyvskyl. His research interests include Neoplatonic symbolism, western
esotericism and astrological magic.

Ellen Rees is Associate Professor in Ibsen Studies at the University of


Oslo. Her research interests include Norwegian literature from 1800 to the
present with emphasis on place, the construction of identity and aspects of
visual culture and adaptation.
Contributors 321

Kirsi Saarikangas is Professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki


and the director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Womens Studies.
She has authored and edited several books and published widely on the
relationship of built space and gender, art historical theories and methods,
as well as Finnish cultural history. Her current research interests are in
urban nature as well as in questions of home, nature and gender in the lived
suburban spaces from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Dr Maria Salenius is Lecturer in British Literature at the University of


Helsinki. Her primary research interests include the religious poetry and
prose of John Donne, language and religion, and the metaphor.

Renja Suominen-Kokkonen is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Lecturer


in Art History at the University of Helsinki, as well as the director of
the Universitys Finnish Doctoral Programme for Art History. She has
published monographs and articles on the formation of the architectural
profession in Finland and on early women architects. Her research includes
articles and a monograph on modern architecture, especially on the
collaboration between Aino and Alvar Aalto, and an edited volume on the
history of art historical research in Finland.

Leena Svinhufvud has been the Curator of Education at Design Museum


Helsinki since 1998. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of
Helsinki and has published widely on Finnish textile art and design.
Index

Acho of Vsters 232 Bell, Richard 21, 22, 254


Ackroyd, Peter 88 Benjamin, Walter xvii, 7, 29, 61, 62,
Adorno, Theodor W. 279 6368, 76, 81
Agnel, Jean Perrin 170 Bentham, Jeremy xi
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 293297, Bergson, Henri 46, 47
301, 307309 Berman, Marshall 57
Aho, Juhani 170174, 179 Bhabha, Homi 285
Aikens, Kristina 98 Blausen, Whitney 215
Ainsworth, William Harrison 95 B, Gudleiv 127
Albrecht, Donald 200 Bonsdorff, Pauline von 51
Albumasar Abalachi 296, 300, 311 Bonyhandy, Tim 22
Allen, Michael J. B. 304306 Booth, Ellen Scripps 199, 206, 208
Amberg, Anna-Lisa 204, 214 Booth, George Gough 199, 202213,
Ames-Lewis, Frances 314 218220
Anderson, Benedict 161, 178 Booth, Henry (Harry) Scripps 205, 206
Andersson Wirde, Maja 214 Botticelli, Sandro 275, 276, 314
Antas, Axel 277, 278, 281 Boudet, Jean-Patrice 296
Anttila, Lauri 278 Boydell, Christine 215
Aquinas, Thomas 310 Boyer, Christine M. 75, 76
Aragon, Louis 63, 7678 Bray, David 115
Aristotle 285 Breuilly, John 169
Ashworth, William 118, 298 Brown, Bill 85, 95, 98, 99, 101, 237
Asikainen, Eveliina 38 Burgwinkle, Bill 235
Astala, Lauri 282, 283 Butler, Judith 23, 24, 90
Astikainen, Riitta 30 Cabanel, Patrick 162, 163
Aug, Marc 115, 143, 144, 158 Camille, Michael 228, 243, 244
Austen, Jane 86, 90, 148, 157 Carlyle, Thomas 147, 157
Bachelard, Gaston xi, 49, 73, 274, 281, Carruthers, Mary 228
282, 285 Carter, Paul 6, 24
Bagehot, Walter 98 Carus, Carl Gustav 275
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 47, 74, 75, 92 Casey, Edward S. xiii, xiv, xv, 168, 285
Balmori, Diana 209, 214, 215, 218 Cassirer, Ernst xvii, 6473, 81
Bardon, Geoffrey 46, 22, 24 Caviness, Madeleine H. 243
Barrell, John 146 Certeau, Michel de xi, xii, 31, 32, 38,
Batty, Philip 6, 7, 16, 17, 20, 22 45, 49, 88
Baudelaire, Charles 57, 67, 79 Christ-Janer, Albert 206, 212, 219
Baudrillard, Jean 77, 78 Clark, John R. 210, 300, 311, 313, 314
Baulch, Vivian M. 203 Clark, Robert Judson 210, 300, 311,
Bauman, Zygmunt 60 313, 314
Beames, Thomas xvii, 86, 91, 100 Colby, Joy Hakanson 210
Index 323

Collins, Philip 99 Gander, Ryan 273275, 278, 289


Colomina, Beatriz xiii Garcia Canclini, Nestor 10
Connolly, Frances 16 Gaskell, Elizabeth 147150
Constable, John 277 Gellner, Ernest 169
Copenhaver, Brian 298, 303, 315 Gerard, John 200203
Corbin, Alain 31 Gilloch, Graeme 65
Crossley, Paul 228, 244 Gissing, George 89
Damisch, Hubert 276 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 165
Danielson, Anna 215 Gombrich, Ernst 301, 314
Davis, Mike 86, 115 Goodman, Nelson 299
Debord, Guy 88, 144 Gormley, Antony 286, 287, 289
Defoe, Daniel 80, 93, 157 Goss, Glenda Dawn 176
De Long, David G. 203, 204, 206, 207 Green, Jenny 19
Denford, Steven L. J. 87, 89, 100 Green, Nicholas 168
Diacceto, Giovanni Cattani da 310312 Grosz, Elizabeth 47, 51
Dickens, Charles xvii, 86, 89, 92101 Haila, Yrj xiv, 32, 161, 164
Didi-Huberman, Georges 274 276 Hamsun, Knut 125, 129, 132, 135137
Dos Passos, John 62, 68 Hannerz, Ulf 115
Duncan, Ian 95 Hannikainen, P. J. 167
Dyos, H. J. 85, 86, 90, 92, 101, 102 Hansen, Maurits C. 125, 129137
Eagleton, Terry 98, 99 Haraway, Donna 31
Eccles, Jeremy 15 Hardy, Thomas 89, 147, 153155, 156,
Eckert, Kathryn Bishop 203, 204, 210 256
Eco, Umberto 298 Harris, Neil 207
Edelfelt, Albert 169 Harvey, David 81, 100, 107, 112, 218
Edgeworth, Maria 94 Hausen, Marika 200
Edwards, Leslie S. 199, 204, 205, 208 Hayden, Dolores 47
Egan, Pierce xvii, 86, 9194 Hyrynen, Maunu 161
Elger, Dietmar 278 Henitt, N. R. 101
Eliasson, Olafur 284, 285, 288 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 288
Eric of Strngns 232 Hiekkanen, Markus 227, 229, 231, 240
Farago, Claire 3, 6, 1113, 18 Hobsbawm, E. J. 161, 163
Faulkner, William 185, 186 Hogarth, William 92, 93
Ficino, Marsilio 294296, 300, 302 Holm, Lillian 201, 214
315 Holquist, Michael 92
Flaubert, Gustave 170 hooks, bell 45, 187
Flint, Kate 87, 8991, 97, 101 House, Humphry 98
Foucault, Michel xi, xii, xvii, 19, 61, Howie, Cary 235
7175, 77, 85, 125, 126, 135, 140 Hudnut, Richard 211
Freedgood, Elaine 85, 101 Humpherys, Anne 99
Frei, Otto 285 Iamblichus of Apamea 294, 307
Fridericianum 273, 276 Ingold, Tim 38, 50
Friedrich, Caspar David 277, 278 Ingvarson, Ruth 201, 214
Frisby, David 59, 65 Iversen, Margaret 50
Furneaux, Holly 9698 James, Louis 91, 93, 95
324 Index

Jameson, Fredric 279 Levine, Steven Z. 177


Jayne, Sears 304 Lichtenstein, Roy 22
Jeffries, Nigel 85, 89, 91 Liebes, Dorothy 215
Jerrold, Douglas 86, 91 Liksom, Rosa 180
Johannes of Uppsala 232 Lindstrm, Merethe 139
Johansen, Knut 129, 130 Linsn, Gabriel 167
Johansson, Hanna xix, 32, 273, 281, Lorch, Emil 206
284, 288 Lukkarinen, Ville 43, 162, 164, 168,
Johnson, Charles 186, 188, 190 169, 175, 179
Johnson, Vivien 4, 6 Lyotard, Jean-Franois xv
Jokinen, Ari 38 Lyytikinen, Pirjo 165, 166, 176, 177
Juel, Poul 127, 128 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 147, 157
Kabakov, Ilya 285 MacLean, Gerald 144
Kahn, Albert 203, 220 Magnus II Tavast, Bishop of Turku 232
Kaprow, Allan 273 Mkinen, Kirsi 38
Karhu, Hanna 176 Mallarm, Stphane 175, 177
Kaske, Carol V. 300, 311, 313, 314 Manninen, Otto 176178
Kervanto Nevanlinna, Anja 34 March, Fernando 289
Kesnen, Juha 30, 35 Marks, Laura U. 280, 281, 283
Kilvert, Robert Francis 147, 150152 Marquis, Samuel 208
Kimber, Dick 10 Marsh, Joss Lutz 98
Kipp, Maria 215 Marter, Joan 202, 211
Kircher, Athanasius 301, 302 Massey, Doreen xiv, 32, 35, 49, 107,
Kivi, Aleksis 161, 162, 176 115, 117, 118
Kleinert, S. 6 Mayne, Alan 89
Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 1822 McEwen, Katherine 210
Kokkonen, Jouko 30 Medici, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de
Konttinen, Riitta 169, 179 314
Koponen, Tanja 286, 287 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice xi, xii, 73,
Kristeva, Julia 47, 49 276, 277
Kuoppamki, Lauri 214 Meurman, Otto-I. 38
Kupka, Karel 14 Mikkola, Kirmo 218
Laitinen, Kai 168 Miller, R. Graig 211
Landry, Donna 144 Milles, Carl 202204, 207, 220
Langton, Marcia 4 Milles, Olga 202204, 207, 220
Larsen, Britt Karin 139 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 228, 238
Lassila, Pertti 166 Mitchell, W. J. T. xiv, 17, 32
Latour, Bruno 50, 274, 280, 285, 287, Mitford, Mary Russell 147150, 158
288 Morphy, Howard 7, 10, 14
Lawrence, saint 231 Morrison, Arthur 89, 94
Lear, George 96 Morrison, Toni 186192
Lefebvre, Henry xi, xii, 32, 107, 112, Morris, William 210
144 Munn, Nancy D. 6
Lehtonen, Joel 174, 175 Musicant, Marilyn R. 215
Levi dAncona, Mirella 315 Namatjira, Albert 5, 6
Index 325

Neale, Margo 18, 19 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig 161, 164170,


Nicolaus of Linkping 232 172, 173, 175178
Niemi, Juhani 170 Russell family (Dukes of Bedford and
Nikula, Riitta 162 London landlords) 91
Nora, Pierre 48 Ryan, Judith 6, 22, 24
Nummi, Jyrki 170 Saarikangas, Kirsi xiii, 33, 210
Nye, David 279 Saarinen, Eero 200
Olwig, Kenneth R. 162 Saarinen, Eliel 199222
Owens, Alastair 85, 89, 91, 97, 101 Saarinen, Loja 199201, 204, 207221
Palm-Gold, Jane 91 Saarinen Swanson, Pipsan (Eva-Liisa)
Pan, Tianshu 115 200, 212
Papastergiadis, Nikos 24 Sandison, Charles 11
Parry, Linda 210 Scheffler, Johann (see Silesius,
Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa 200 Angelus) 3
Perec, Georges 88 Schoeser, Mary 215
Perkins, Hetti 15 Schur, Edouard 176
Perrone Compagni, Vittoria 293 Schwan, Anne 97, 98
Peter the Venerable 231 Sen, Sambudha 92
Petterson, Per 125, 138, 139 Shaw, Clement Burbank 165, 166
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 301 Shelston, Alan 154
Pingree, David 300 Silesius, Angelus ix
Plato 277, 298, 304 Sillanp, Frans Eemil 180
Pollock, Griselda 168 Silverman, Kaja 38
Pound, Arthur 199, 204, 206, 209, 219 Simmel, Georg 59, 75, 79
Pys, Jyrki 33 Sinclair, Iain 88
Presley, Elvis 180 Sjvik, Jan 130, 132
Preziosi, Donald 3 Slater, Michael 96, 97
Proust, Marcel 47 Sloterdijk, Peter 274, 282, 285288
Radcliffe, Ann 96 Soja, Edward W. xii, 32, 73, 143, 144,
Rastimo, Kaisa 38 158
Ray, Gene 279 Sommer, Doris 130
Read, Herbert 147, 155 Sontag, Susan 24
Reed, Ishmael 186, 188190 Stafford, Barbara Maria 228, 298, 299
Rekula, Heli 280, 281, 283 Stanbury, Sarah 235, 243
Relph, Edward 32 Standertskjld, Elina 206
Reynolds, G. W. M. xvii, 86, 95, 96 Steinmetz, George 110
Richter, Gerhard 278 Sterne, Laurence 94
Riegl, Alois 50 Stieglitz, Alfred 61, 62
Rilke, Rainer Maria 282 Suominen-Kokkonen, Renja 208, 215
Rivard, Derek A. 227 Svinhufvud, Leena 212, 215, 216, 218
Rocque, John 93 Swanson, J. Robert F. 206, 207, 212
Rogoff, Irit 31 Syrjmaa, Tarja 51
Roivainen, Irene 33 Tambling, Jeremy 89, 97, 99
Rossi, Riikka 170, 171, 175 Taragin, Davida S. 199, 203, 211, 224
Rubin, Miri 234, 235 Thackeray, William Makepeace 98
326 Index

Thiesse, Anne-Marie 161 Zhang, Li 111, 114


Thurman, Christa C. Mayer 200, 201, Zola, mile 6770, 78
203, 204, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, hquist, Johannes 207, 208, 211215,
217 218
Tiitta, Allan 164, 165, 167
Tillotson, Kathleen 98100
Tjampitjinpa, Kaapa 5, 24
Tomlinson, Ian 88
Topelius, Zacharias 161, 165168, 173,
177
Toussaint, Stphane 313
Trismegistos, Hermes 305
Tuan, Yi-Fu 58
Tuomi, Timo 200, 206, 207, 209
Turner, James G. 144
Tysdahl, Bjrn 130
Umbach, Maiken 208
VanderBeke Mager, Diane 201, 203
Vickers, Brian 298, 302
Vickers, George 95
Vidor, King 59, 60, 62
Virilio, Paul 143
Walker Bunym, Caroline 230, 234, 235
Walker, Daniel P. 294, 307, 310, 312
Wallon, Henri 38
Wamberg, Jacob 275, 277
Warburg, Aby 64, 274276
Ward, Joseph 144
Watt, Ian 79, 80
Weber, Max xvi, 5962, 75
Weill-Parot, Nicolas 296, 300, 309
Westbrook, Adele 200, 203, 207, 218
Williams, Raymond 79, 143, 144
Winsor, Frederick Albert 93
Winton, Alexandra Griffith 215
Witoszek, Nina 127
Wittkopp, Gregory 199, 206208, 211
Wordsworth, William 146, 147, 151
153
Yarowsky, Anne 200, 203, 207, 218
Yates, Frances A. 48, 298, 313, 314
Yeats, W. B. 176
Young, Iris Marion 34
Zhan, Erpeng 116

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