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Memory and Place from the Red Center of Australia to the Periphery of
Paris: To See the Frame that Blinds Us
Claire Farago..........................................................................................3
II Urban Spaces
IV Locations
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
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
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
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
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)
Contributing Essays
Bibliography
Claire Farago
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
Kirsi Saarikangas
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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 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)
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
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)
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
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.
Multisensory memories
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)
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
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
Literature
Urban Spaces
Urban Imagery between Enchantment
and Disenchantment
Bart Keunen
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
21
In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard describes how the perception of the postmodern
78 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
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
References
Jason Finch
Introduction
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.
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
88 Finch
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
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
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).
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)
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)
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)
Two Dickenses
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)
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
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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Harvey, David. 2008. The Right to the City. New Left Review 53:2340.
http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.
Holquist, Michael. 1981. Glossary. In The Dialogic Imagination, by
M.M. Bakhtin, 42334. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian
London. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press.
Ledger, Sally and Holly Furneaux, eds. 2011. Charles Dickens in Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marsh, Joss Lutz. (1991) 1995. Good Mrs Browns Connections:
Sexuality and Story-telling in Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and
Son. In Charles Dickens: Critical Assessments. Four volumes. Edited
104 Finch
Philipp Demgenski
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
References
National Spaces
Cabins and National Identity
in Norwegian Literature
Ellen Rees
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
4
Et Lycksaligt Liv Eftertnckt Da Indbilding og Forfarenhed Derom Disputerede.
5
En Bonde-Hyte / som et Konge-Slot skal blive.
128 Rees
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
References
Angela 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
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.
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
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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.
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
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
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
and landscape painting spread at the time; see e.g. Konttinen 2001, 22024;
Lukkarinen 2004, 3134.
180 Lyytikinen
Conclusions
References
Locations
Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives,
Plantation Architecture and the Ideology
of the Romance of the South
Julia Faisst
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
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
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
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).
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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)
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
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
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
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
Figure 104. The Studio Loja Saarinen, cover of a printed brochure dated
in 1932. Copyright Cranbrook Archives, Saarinen Family Papers (1990-08).
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.
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
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
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
Katja 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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)
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.
References
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.
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 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
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.
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)
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)
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.
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
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)
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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)
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
References
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
Press.
Docherty, Thomas. 1986. John Donne, Undone. London: Methuen.
Donne, John. 1967. The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Edited by John T.
Shawcross. New York: Anchor Books.
. (1959) 2000. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
. (1611) 1969. Ignatius his Conclave. Edited by T. S. Healy, S.J.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 195362. Sermons. Edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn M.
Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Flynn, Dennis. 1995. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gorton, L. M. 1999. Philosophy and the City: Space in Donne. John
Donne Journal 18:6171.
Guibbory, Achsah. 1986. The Map of Time. Seventeenth-Century English
Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Hester, M. Thomas, ed. 1997. John Donnes Desire of More: The Subject of
Anne Donne in His Poetry. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press.
. 1987. Re-Signing that Text of the Self: Donnes As due by Many
Titles. In Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse: The Seventeeth-
Century Religious Lyric, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth, 5971. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
The Holy Bible. s.a. The Authorized King James Version (1611). London:
British and Foreign Bible Society.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lear, John. 1965. Keplers Dream. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Lindley, Arthur. 1998. John Donne, Batter my Heart, and English Rape
Law. John Donne Journal 17:7588.
Malpezzi, Frances M. 1995. Donnes Transcendent Imagination: The
Divine Poems as Hierophantic Experience. In John Donnes Religious
Imagination, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M.
Malpezzi, 14161. Conway: UCA Press.
Masselink, Noralyn. 1992. A Matter of Interpretation: Example and
Donnes Role as Preacher and Poet. John Donne Journal 11:8598.
McLeod, Bruce. 1999. The Geography of Empire in English Literature.
272 Salenius
Hanna 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.
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).
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
5
Richter painted his landscapes from photographs.
The Disappearance of Gravity 279
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
6
Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht was exhibited at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary
Art, in Helsinki, Finland, in 2012.
The Disappearance of Gravity 281
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
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
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.
References
Frhling. Eine Untersuchung ber die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der
Italienischen Frhrenaissance. In Aby Warburgs Gesammelte Schriften
(I-1): Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche
Beitr ge zur Geschichte der europischen Renaissance, edited by Gertrud
Bing and Fritz Rougemont. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces
of a Renaissance Magus
Lauri Ockenstrm
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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)
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
Conclusions
References