Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese PDF
Preview Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese
Cities, Words and Images From Poe to Scorsese Patrizia Lombardo Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe andDenise Riley Selected published titles: Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING The Logic of the Gaze Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Theresa de Lauretis TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE The Woman’s Film of the 1940s Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS The Daughter’s Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Alan Hunt GOVERNANCE OF THE CONSUMING PASSIONS A History of Sumptuary Law Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE Patrizia Lombardo CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Second edition Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Christopher Norris RESOURCES OF REALISM Prospects for ‘Post-Analytic’ Philosophy Denise Riley ‘AM I THAT NAME?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History Jacqueline Rose PETER PAN, OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN’S FICTION Moustapha Safouan SPEECH OR DEATH? Language as Social Order: a Psychoanalytic Study Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology Lyndsey Stonebridge THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT British Psychoanalysis and Modernism Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter THE MAKING OF THE READER Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71482-9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Cities, Words and Images From Poe to Scorsese Patrizia Lombardo Professor of French and Comparative Literature University of Geneva © Patrizia Lombardo 2003 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-333-69628-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVEMACMILLANis the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-40206-9 ISBN 978-0-230-28669-6 (eBook) DOI10.1057/9780230286696 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lombardo, Patrizia. Cities, words and images : from Poe to Scorsese / Patrizia Lombardo. p. cm. — (Language, discourse, society) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cities and towns in art. 2. Arts, Modern—19th century. 3. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. NX650.C66 L66 2002 700’.4321732’09034—dc21 2002072323 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xiii 1 Edgar Allan Poe: The Domain of Artifice 1 2 Van Gogh and Hofmannsthal: Colours and Silence 46 3 Baudelaire, Haussmann, Fustel de Coulanges: The Modern Metropolis and the Ancient City 62 4 Trieste as Frontier: From Slataper to Bazlen and Del Giudice 80 5 Aldo Rossi: The White Walls of the City 96 6 Massimo Cacciari and the Philosophy of the City 108 7 Absence and Revelation: Photography as the Art of Nostalgia 150 8 The Image versus the Visible: From Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life to David Lynch’s Lost Highway 174 9 Martin Scorsese and the Rhythm of the Metropolis 186 Notes 216 General Bibliography 238 Index 242 v Preface In spite of the current academic fixation on the idea that all is rhetoric, it seems impossible to deny that cities are concrete realities. A city is a living body, which can be harmed and maimed. Words and images have long been used to describe the presence of cities, their physical and mental impact on human life. In this book, I am interested in words and images – or in literature, criticism, and the visual arts – in so far as they are concerned with urban reality, aware that such a reality creates a way of life and new conditions for modern art. This book would like to emphasize the cultural role of the city. The city is a recurrent and essential theme in literature, painting, architecture, photography, and film. Cities have been scrutinized from a great variety of perspectives. A substantial bibliography presents diverse visions of a number of cities in different historical periods, as well as of the urban phenomenon in general as a mode of living. A classic book on this theme is The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford, which explores the architecture of a number of cities from the classical age to the twentieth century. In Cities, Words and Images, the historical period I investigate corresponds to the two centuries of modern life and modern art, ‘from Poe to Scorsese’, as suggested by the subtitle. I endorse the modernist vision of the nineteenth century as the epoch when the urban phenomenon became overwhelming and affected the way in which people lived and thought. From the German school of urban sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century (Max Weber, Georg Simmel), to Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, many critics and thinkers have felt that literature and the arts – or words and images – changed thoroughly when human beings had to face the rise of massive industrial production and urbanization. The metropolitan experience hinges on the continuous exchange process that, as suggested by Max Weber, has characterized the city and its market since the Middle Ages, and, as hinted by Simmel, has increased since the advent of the nineteenth-century city, with the rapid circula- tion of money and goods. This experience is fundamental for the understanding of modern art, whatever the media, of the culture of modernity, regardless of national frontiers. The metropolitan phenom- enon is at the basis of today’s world. vii viii Preface Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire are inevitable references. They are not simply two writers who described cities – so many writers have done so. They represent, in opposition to their contemporaries, the awareness that the urban or, more precisely, the metropolitan land- scape is the place where modern sensitivity and modern art begin. The emergence of the metropolis in the nineteenth century was an awesome phenomenon: Paris and London profoundly impressed those who observed their tantalizing growth. But the rise of metropolises belongs also to the geography of the mind, since it entails a new way of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting. This book reflects on the link between the changes in human perception created by urbaniza- tion, and the way in which these changes were expressed in the arts. In order to cope with the complexity of urban reality, city dwellers had to develop their faculty of abstraction. As understood by Poe and Baudelaire, modern art had to include a high level of abstraction. Poe and Baudelaire are the key figures of modernity for the most celebrated twentieth-century critics, such as Walter Benjamin, whose visions of the metropolitan experience have become standard references in the global market-place of ideas. Within Western culture, the opposition of the natural and the urban has long inspired critical choices in aesthetics and politics. This book first focuses on ardent reactions to the metropolitan explosion in the nineteenth century. The visions of Poe and Baudelaire are contrasted with those of some of their contemporaries, and I give great import- ance to their attempt to create literary forms consistent with the pace of modern life. Poe insisted on questions of composition and tech- nique and thought that short forms such as the poem or the short story best responded to the speed of contemporary life. Baudelaire’s aesthetic conceptions integrate the relationship between the metro- politan reality and an art capable of representing modern life, both its concrete manifestations and its powerful abstract component. His com- ments on Delacroix and Constantin Guys are as crucial for modern aesthetics as his themes and style, in the verses of Les Fleurs du Maland in the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris. More recent, often incompatible attitudes towards the city are then probed, in Europe and the United States, from rejection to idolatry. The artistic movements in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth were an immediate response to the growth of the Hapsburg capital; and they became the object of further theoretical investigation in the late twentieth century. The urban theme makes it necessary to consider the visions of several architects and Preface ix theoreticians of architecture: two central chapters in this book treat this topic. The Italian architect Aldo Rossi conceived, from the early 1960s, of a close relationship between the city and architecture itself; in his reading of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari provided in the 1970s the ground for the discussion of different ideologies on the urban phenomenon. Finally, my inquiry concentrates on a third medium: the cinema. The works of certain film-makers, such as David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, and particular critical issues in contemporary film theory raised by André Bazin, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, bring into focus the role of images in our world. Films have represented various cities for more than a century. Nevertheless, not unlike liter- ature, film can do much more than merely capture the visual aspect of urban landscapes. First of all, because cinema in general is itself the realization of what has been called ‘the aesthetic of disappearance’, which characterizes the conditions of perception in modern life. Second, because film techniques, for example in Scorsese’s master- pieces, render the rhythm of metropolitan life. As I have already suggested, I am interested in the metropolitan theme in its connection with the problem of representing and express- ing modern life both in terms of content and form. Without the spark of that connection, the urban landscape in literature or the arts is mere décor, and the thematic approach remains a mere list of descriptive examples. My perspective aims at being dynamic: this requires a con- tinuous interplay between theoretical concern and analytical concen- tration on specific cases. Textual scrutiny, intellectual history, and aesthetic study do not involve, in my opinion, antagonistic methods, just as disciplines are not isolated realms. The same urban theme or motif links writers, architects, historians, critics and film-makers, as it links the nineteenth century and the contemporary world, European experiences and American ones. As I propose in one chapter, cultural phenomena do not tally with the model of evolution but with that of contagion. Cultural phenomena spread like viruses, breaching temporal and geo- graphical boundaries. Cities are at the centre of cultural life. It seems to me that Poe’s vision of the man of the crowd as the allegory of the metropolis, as well as the insights of Baudelaire’s aesthetics, should be drawn on if many contentions about modern art and modern life are to be cogent. For that reason, I interpret David Lynch’s or Martin Scorsese’s choices in filmmaking in the light of Baudelaire’s ideas. This book studies the real Paris of Baudelaire, the fantasized London and Paris in
The list of books you might like
