Review Essay Recent Studies on Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism John M. Ganim Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, By Jennifer Bloomer. Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Iviii + 248 pp. $32.00. Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture. By Massimo Cacciari, Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Introduction by Patrizia Lom- bardo. Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism. New Haven, Conn.; Yale University Press, 1993. lviii + 248 pp. $35.00. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France. By Philippe Hamon. Translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire. Introduction by Richard Sieburth, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, no. 20. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xv + 218 pp. $30.00. F“ the past decade or so, architectural theory has had a privileged position in contemporary critical discourse, largely because of the ongoing debate on postmodernism. Architecture and its theory have promised to illuminate the study of other forms, much as film theory did in the early 1970s: as the master narrative that provides the vocab- ulary and the themes of cultural analysis. That promise has yet to be fulfilled. Recently, however, several books have appeared that realize the potential of the comparison, largely by conceiving of it as some- thing other than a comparison. Philippe Hamon’s Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France has been published in a s. Yale University Pre: series, Theoretical Perspectives in Architectural History and Criticism, under the editorship of Mark Rakatansky, has been inaugurated with Jennifer Bloomer’s already influential Architecture and the Text and with translation by the University of California Pre: 's Modern Language Quarterly 56:3, September 1995. © 1995 University of Washington.364 MLQI September 1995 the first large-scale English translations of the writings of Massimo Cac- ciari, published as Architecture and Nihilism. The publication of these books also may help to reconsider the uses of the architectural and lit- erary analogy itself through literary and architectural history, and in fact such a reconsideration is necessary for understanding their pro- jects. ‘The architectural analogy has always haunted writing and think- ing about writing, much as the analogies of grammar and style and lan- guage and vocabulary have haunted architecture. Indeed, the legacy of classical rhetoric for literary invention has largely been understood as either structure or decoration. The most famous description of “the writing process” in the Middle Ages is Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s exhorta- tion to plan a work by building a foundation and drawing up plans. Since the eighteenth-century celebration of the “Gothick” and the cor- responding celebration of romance, architecture has served as a metaphor in the study and the craft of literature.’ For the “Gothick,” the defense of a formally scorned architecture (and landscape) was transferred to the defense of a previously ignored literary form. With the rise of formal academic literary study, particularly as it arose in a late-nineteenth-century climate of romantic analogies among the arts, architecture took its place as one of the metaphors for style, in fact, a metaphor that became metonymic, since style was understood to cross media. Hence, the baroque, the gothic, and so forth, largely architec- tural terms that are used, with only partial success, to classify literary forms. The necessity for historical categorization and the identity of styles across media remained as a constant in literary study until the rise of high structuralism in the 1950s and after. Structuralism proposed lan- guage as a master metaphor, subsuming both the literary and archi- tectural to something like a grammar. Poststructuralist thought, par- 1 See Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Bight Cen- turies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960). John Ganim is professor of English and Coordinator of the Focussed Research Group on Architecture, Urbanism, and Theory at the Uni- versity of California, Riverside. His most recent book is Chaucerian Theatricality (1990).anim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 365 ticularly the direction pursued by deconstruction, in fact had an influ- ence on architectural practice as well as theory. Derrida collaborated with the architect Peter Eisenmann on one proposal for the develop- ment of the park at La Villette in Paris, and Philip Johnson coined the awkward term deconstructivist to describe the work of younger avant- garde architects in the 1980s, apparently inspired both by Russian con- structivist forms and by Derridean deconstruction. Poststructuralism has been uneasily joined by two other critical practices. Phenomenol- ogy had already concerned itself with the experience of space, and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space remains one of the most influential studies of its type.* Indeed, structuralism had sought to replace phe- nomenology’s understanding of the world as a matter of experience and authenticity with an understanding of the world as a constructed grammar and a system of signs. Despite this critique, Bachelard’s almost delirious reverie is echoed in the readings, if not in the theses, of many recent studies of space and place in literature. The theses and arguments of these studies, however, are more often indebted, as are the books under review, to the most idiosyncratic of the Frankfurt School thinkers, Walter Benjamin. ‘The wings of Walter Benjamin hover over these books, as they do above most recent writings about architecture, urbanism, and litera- ture. Benjamin joined other German social thinkers in the analysis of the metropolis as the site for modernity, with all the disorientation and delirium associated with the shock of modernization. For Benjamin, the paradigmatic experience of the modern was, in the title of his famous article, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and its par- adigmatic poet was Baudelaire.’ The characteristic subject through whose eyes we see this Paris is the flaneur, the casual, wandering observer, ever fascinated with the exhibits, the architecture and build- ings, and the social display of the new bourgeois city. Yet the Paris that the flaneur organizes for us is an illusion obscuring the chaos and dis- location occasioned by Haussmann’s redevelopment of old Paris, replacing its medieval streets and traditional neighborhoods with 2 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964). ‘ Benjamin, uminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, ans. Harry Zohn (New York: 9) Schocken, 19366 MLQI September 1 grand boulevards, great squares, and official monuments. Baudelaire reveals this other Paris, and his demimonde is in some sense a new underworld, where the victims of the new official Paris lurk. In his analysis, Benjamin combines the critical perspective of radical demys- tification with a certain fascination not unrelated to that of the flaneur. Other theorists of the city, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, had recourse to a certain nostalgia, opposing the natural life of the village community to the new human organism, the city dweller, virtually cre- ated by the frenetic pace of city life.‘ For all his insistence on the his- torical as the chief, even transcendent category of human experience, Benjamin introduced the spatial as the site for political conflict and human consciousness with such power that he has become, in many ways, one of the constant points of return of postmodern discourse, as the books under review, in some very different ways, demonstrate. Ben- jamin even allows them, I believe, their peculiar synthesis of phenom- enological meditation and poststructuralist demystification, which is partly why they can move beyond the limits of comparison or analogy between the architectural, the literary, or philosophical. Benjamin's apparently critical but nevertheless seductive image of the society as a spectacle has a structural influence on Philipe Hamon’s Expositions. Hamon creates a virtual reality of images drawn from novels, arrayed as if on display. He seems to imitate consciously the technique of the world’s fair or of the window display and arranges nineteenth-century French literature in this format. The result is often dazzling, as a display would be, but the profusion of signs obscures a certain circularity in the argument, one that I believe is typical not so much of Hamon but of all efforts to link the architec- tural and the literary. In an interesting reversal of most comparative assumptions, Hamon argues in his opening section that literature depends on other arts “to define itself” (17). Yet in a restatement of a relatively banal Hegelianism, he suggests that cultural history has always linked the architectural and the literary, especially during “the crises that beset the areas of the imaginary, of theory and of architec- ture” (19). To the degree that novels imagine social space, where the 4 Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, IIL: Free Press, 1950).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 367 public and the private intersect, they are necessarily dependent on architectural settings and metaphors. Indeed, architecture becomes something of a master discourse for nineteenth-century French novel- ists in Hamon’s account, representing both modernity and memory. Despite, or perhaps because of, its careful organization, a passage from Expositions can be chosen almost at random to illustrate its char- acteristic procedures and methods: “As you know, I have a habit of questioning buildings at close quarters,” wrote Victor Hugo in Le Rhin before describing his encounter with a particularly enigmatic funerary inscription. For the Romantic anti- quary, the world was a succession of more or less meaningful edifices and each one provided a hermeneutic adventure. Such structures enabled face-to-face encounters with other cultures whose architectural objects had to be identified, qualified, described and resuscitated; thus, two sorts of plenitudes were brought face to face. Antiquaries were not just great surveyors of cities, monuments and archaeological sites; they were above all connoisseurs of engraved inscriptions—ambulatory enthusiasts of signs. They delighted in inscriptions on such noble mat rials as marble, bronze, or freestone carved in such noble typographies as hieroglyphics or Roman characters, in such noble languages as Latin or Greek, and found on such noble architectural supports as plinths, tombstones, steles, pediments, or altars. The travel account, which is a discourse about touring, is first and foremost a tour through discourse. (53) Hamon synthesizes literary history, the explication of specific passages (often, significantly, from the journals and letters of writers as well as from their poetry or fictional prose), semiotics, and a critical argu- ment, in the fashion of Benjamin, about the apparently objective apprehen: cally, subjective. As in this passage, the romantic author (here Hugo) understands the exotic other or the mysterious past as if it were the n of the built environment as profoundly, and ideologi- Paris of expositions, window displays, and great department stores. The writer requires architecture to imagine a world, but that architec- ture turns out to be an architecture of words as much as one of mate- rials. Language both explains and renders more mysterious or exotic the mute architectural object. It is precisely this question of a master discourse that haunts Hamon’s argument, as it does architectural theory and its link to the368 MLQ1I September 1995, literary in general. Architecture, as it were, “explains” literature but is unable to explain itself and therefore requires literary analogies and vocabularies at the heart of its most crucial theories and programs. A local habitation requires a name: “A place is never truly a place until it has become a named locality” (45). As a dialectic, Hamon’s shuttling back and forth between discourses would seem to be extraordinarily effective, demonstrating his point by the dramatization as much as by the logic of his argument. But everywhere his architecture is sur- rounded by words and verbal images as much by space. It is as if the mute buildings and streets were surrounded and filled by chattering novelists, inquiring and measuring and recording each stone. We are left to meditate on architecture as if it were a mysterious sphinx. This image, that of the ruin, and particularly the romantic ruin, is only one of the building types he chooses for his frame of reference. The oth- ers—the transparent glass house and its related exhibition—are explicitly part of the architecture of display, but display that demands to be read and annotated. These building types have now been classi- fied, along with Haussmann’s boulevards, as the canonical architecture of nineteenth-century Paris. They are prominent partly because of their frequent illustration in the Parisian magazines of the time but also because Benjamin and others have taught us to look for these images. As a result, we find ourselves imagining a landscape that is being simulated, as it were, by intellectual discourse. In its own way, Benjamin’s paradigmatically modern Paris is as romantic an image as the Gothic ruin. Hamon conceives of architecture as the setting that literature must imagine itself in, and therefore that which already inhabits the appar- ently blank page. It becomes, therefore, the referent that all the signs of literature continually point to—it is in a sense the real. Read out of context, Hamon’s argument might be understood as a sophisticated version of mimesis. But this may be because his frame of reference is the great age of literary realism, which, in French literature, also con- tained a critique of its own agenda. For Hamon the relation of litera- ture and architecture results in the reinscription of the mimetic and 5 For an interesting sampling of comparative scholarship on architecture and literature slightly earlier than the books under review see Philippe Hamon, ed., Lit erature et architecture (Rennes: Presses Universitaires des Rennes, 1988); and the issue on “Architecture and Literature” of Via 8 (1986).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 369 the reconstitution of realism as an assemblage of details. However arbi- , one senses in Hamon’s treatment trary the sign system of those detail of them a subtle insistence on referentiality. The architecture and fur- niture and streets of nineteenth-century France felt and looked the way they feel and look in the books that describe them (even for their contemporaries, one assumes). This apparently contradictory assump- tion of a city of things and a city of signs, a city in time and place and a city in literature, only may be a contradiction from an American liter- ary tradition. In France, and perhaps only until recently, books have had a virtually architectural mode of existence, as solid and as sub- stantial as any building or boulevard, and literally themselves become part of the architecture and furniture of the social as well as of the individual world. In Jennifer Bloomer’s Architecture and the Text: The (S)orypts of Joyce and Piranesi, books are less like buildings than like bodies, and build- ings are like bodies too. Bloomer’s book takes off from, and to some extent imitates, the form of Finnegans Wake. Her Wake may be more familiar to artists (one of Cage’s last collabora was his performance of the Wake) than to literary scholars. Joyce has ions with Cunningham become to some extent canonized as an originator of postmodernism rather than of modernism. Bloomer begins with Bernard Tschumi assertion that Finnegans Wake is the greatest work of architecture in the twentieth century. But, in addition, Bloomer’ inist theory, the Joyce whose language is offered by Kristeva as a model Joyce is the Joyce of fem- for a future discourse and recanonized by Cixous. Bloomer translates the languages of feminist theory into the grammar of architecture, and the result is a complex metaphorics of architecture as body. From the oozing body of Humpty Dumpty in the opening pages of her first essay, to a catalog of her own children born and lost, Bloomer insists on the inseparable viscerality and intellectuality of architecture, claiming by implication this inseparability as the agenda of a feminist architecture and theory, Such an analysis, of course, depends upon the concomi- tant analogy, or allegory, of the text as a body, one that Joyce’s writing and Joyce scholarship, and feminist theory and scholarship, have elab- orated. Architectural theory since Vitruvius has depended upon the metaphor of vocabulary, but that vocabulary is by and large visual (sometimes posing as structural in the engineering sense). Bloomer's370 MLQJ September 1995 chief revision is to question that reliance on the visual in architectural theory. Her title is Architecture and the Text. She seeks to replace an understanding of architecture as a series of visually comprehensible orders with an understanding of architecture as akin to, or as, text. My understanding of this shift in her terms is not that she seeks a linguis- tic taxonomy but that she seeks to uncover how architecture, and a cri- tique of architecture, can account for the variously subversive and sus- taining ways that the reading of texts provides, assuming that texts, of course, are by nature ultimately Joycean. The linkage is provided by the pun on [Sjerypt in the title, equating writing with architectural space, hidden enclosures with hidden meanings. In so doing, Piranesi is shown to be concerned with crypts in the sense of cryptography and coded meanings, and Joyce with enclosure and space, both somatic and constructed. Although this move may strike a practicing practical architect as excessively literary, its actual theoretical contribution is radically architectural, for it shifts the understanding of the architec- tural away from the facade and the decorative and toward the space within, the crypt, the room, the passage—that which links the archi- tectural and the visceral. In so doing, Bloomer allows a critique of both the modern—with its celebration of structure and direct expression— and the postmodern in its neoclassical mode—with its celebration of decoration and symbolism. The modeling of critical discourse on Joyce’s Wake has a surpris- ingly long history if one bothers to pursue it, say, to Norman O. Brown's Love's Body, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and oth- ers. There is a tradition of avant-garde formal experimentation in aca- demic prose, which has recently become a virtual canon in some of Derrida’s work from the 1980s and Avital Ronell’s spectacularly intelli- gent Telephone Book.* Bloomer’s book is in this mode but with a specific purpose: it seeks to become itself the sort of architecture it is describ- ing. In one stretch of her book that is at least possible to reproduce typographically here, Bloomer writes: ® Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966); McLuhan, Understand- ing Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Ronell, The Tele- phone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 371 Shem writes, Shaun delivers. Shaun and Shem appear in the Wake as Same and Th’other; both the twins of Plato and Thamous, regal repre- sentative of Amon Ra, the sun god who creates by speaking, and Thoth, the inventor of writing, a “cure” for memory loss, which is rejected (as a poison) by Thamous [HEN, PHARMAKON,] Helene Cixous: “Shaun boasts of being the possessor of all words as he is the master of all men, and thus establishes his allegiance to capitalism and patriarchy” (Exile of Joyce, 743). Fredric Jameson’s happy typo in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” is telling here. (“Who has known how to metamorphose a ‘typo’ proper to protect the one with a slip into which the other can fall?”; Derrida Post Card, 515) After noting the commercial failure that is due to the inability of shoppers to find the boutiques in John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, Jameson writes: “When you recall that Postman is a businessman as well as an architect, and a millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and the same time a capitalist in his own right, one cannot feel that here too something of a ‘return of the repressed’ is involved” (83; emphasis mine). (54) The passage illustrates both Bloomer’s methodology and her thesis in its stunning logic and its apparent wanderings. In the pairing of allu- sions to deities of speech and of writing, Joyce becomes a precursor of Derrida but also is incomplete without an understanding of Derrida. As in postmodern architecture itself, the development of the para- graph is achieved by references, sometimes flattering, sometimes not, to earlier commentators. Following Cixous, Joyce becomes the femi- nist Joyce, or at least the Joyce who exposes and sometimes inverts the patriarchal triumph of the written. Cixous’s reading of Joyce, with its feminist-deconstructive tropes, provides one leitmotif of Bloomer’s book—the “Hen,” which develops into a related set of puns and associations on chicken scratches and writing, chicken coops as archi- chitecture and their relation to mothering and to the paradoxes of the body. Myth returns to haunt rationality. tecture, but also eggs as Jameson's influential essay, with its pessim and even a certain suspicion of deconstruction as part of rather than critical of an increasingly frightening and deplorable modernity, is shown to in fact “unconsciously” mimic Derrida—John Portman tic view of recent change becomes “Postman,” which Bloomer frames in terms of Derrida’s famous Post Card but also in terms of the divisions of Shem and372 MLQ1 September 1995 Shaun.’ Architecture becomes writing, writing becomes architecture, and both are subject to the failures of containment, in material and language. If I have any problems with this frequently brilliant and usually original argument, it is that it depends on some assumptions that are somewhat more problematic in practice than in theory. What, for example, would be an architecture that followed her speculations? The result, I believe, would look much like the architecture celebrated in that uncharted period between modernism and postmodernism in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Italian hill-towns, the villages and houses celebrated in Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects and some, but very few, examples of “critical regionalism.”* That is, all these examples combine precisely the myth, ritual, and domesticity that Bloomer’s more mystical tendencies combine, though without her leavening combination of terror and humor, a combination nicely sug- gested in her two chief exemplars, Joyce and Piranesi. Except in its most sardonic varieties, humor is not a strategy employed by Massimo Cacciari in the writings collected as Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture. Cacciari under- stands the experience of the metropolis, almost as an allegorical agent, as a form of knowledge, as ultimately demythologizing and disen- chanting, as radical rationality, rather than as disorienting confusion. For Cacciari, the shock of modernity is the s This almost Nietzchean perspective, with its proclamation of the metropolis as the degree zero of modernity, may seem at first to be sur- prising coming from Italy, and especially from Venice, and especially from the Italian left, with its Gramscian heritage. Corbusier’s famous ‘ock of knowledge itself. manifesto of modernism, Towards a New Architecture, ends with the famous question “Architecture or Revolution?” and the cryptic answer, “Revolution can be avoided.”® But for Cacciari, as for his late colleague 7 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). Bloomer here refers to the original publication of the article in New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-93- 8 Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: An Introduction to Nonpedigreed Architec- ture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964). ° Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Praeger, 1970).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 373 Manfredo Tafuri, architecture is not enough and cannot by itself trans- form, or even subvert, anything. Its real power is as a form of criti- cism. The utopian agenda of modernism is revealed as an illusion, and lies through such a revelation, Cace himself with postmodernism, even with “post-Marxism,” inflected by the peculiarly Italian concep- tion of “weak thought.” These philosophical and political negotiations have much to do with the development of Italian Marxism and with Italian intellectual self-definition in general. Cacciari turns to central Europe rather than the Mediterranean for his orientation, reinscribing a Venetian and Northeastern Italian tendency. But in so doing, he also insists on the priority of the urban north over (rather than in relation to) the rural south, The visitor to Venice might regard its planning as the ideal toward which postmodern urbanism, following Jane Jacobs, has pointed, but Cacciari’s Veneto is composed of the enormous chemical factories looming in the postimpressionist atmosphere of Venice.!! The Gramscian stress on the organic relation of the intellectual to pop- ular culture, on the potential of subversion and local contestation, em like nostalgic humanism from such a perspective. Cac- ciari implicitly subjects to the postmodern critique much that post- modernism elsewhere has celebrated in Italian political thought. (Although one might follow the intellectual trajectory waced by Cac- ciari’s writings, it is something of a puzzle how it leads to his recent election as mayor of Venice, whose citizens presumably thought they were electing an even earlier, syndicalist Cacciari to the post.) His vision of the world begins to milar to a Foucauldian vision without the possi- bility of local subversion. The selections that make up Architecture and Nihilism move from early 1970s essays that deal with the German sociology of the city to later 1970s and early 1980s works that regard the architecture of Loos as quite literally a Wittgensteinian “philosophical investigation.” The earlier essays are more strongly influenced by Benjamin, but the later 10 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Ba Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976). 11 Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: Random House, 1984); The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).374 MLQI September 1995, parts of the book have a strongly Heideggarian and Nietzchean c: Part of Cacciari’s agenda as an architectural historian is to reinterpret Loos, one apparent pillar of modernism, as in fact a covert postmod- ernist, much as Bloomer seeks to do with Joyce, or Hamon with some of the French realists. The Loos fami st. ir to most students of mod- ernism is the Loos of extreme rationalist modernism, of the dictum that “ornament is crime,” who then confounds his followers with his astonishing submission to the Chicago Tribune competition, a sky- scraper as a giant Doric column. Ifa previous generation of modernists simply did not know what to do with this project, neohistorical post- modern architecture, with its delight in quotation, has read the build- ing as one of its precursors. Cacciari interrogates earlier Loos work as a much more problematic investigation of the idea of architecture than that exemplified in the maxims of modernism, “form follows func- tion,” “ornament is crime,” “less is more.” Cacciari describes how Loos's architecture questioned the self-satisfaction of turn-of-the-century Vienna and became a virtual anti-Vienna; in this sense, Loos presents something of a model for Cacciari’s own enterprise. Cacciari’s insistent focus on Vienna and Germany in the first two decades of the century allows him to construct a dialogue between Loos'’s architecture and the apparently divergent trends in the litera- ture of the period, exemplified by Kafka and Rilke, and allows him to rethink the important precedent of Walter Benjamin on these very topics. But Benjamin both analyzed and became the flaneur, both scorned the tinny illusions of urban life and loved them. This dialectic in Benjamin is consistent with his politics, but it also is responsible for his continuing importance and int But Cacciari feels that Ben- jamin does not go far enough. Poe, Baudelaire, Kafka, all poets of the metropolis for Benjamin, do not merely reflect or even critique the new shock experience of modernity—they virtually become moder- nity itself, and no more so than in their employment of form and their deployment of language: Poe’s tales all reveal the same structure: contradiction, shock, and mad- ness itself, as a constant starting point, slowly unveil their own language. The image of madness, which in Romanticism would imply the simple negation of subjectivity, is indeed rational in Poe, not rationalized, not cured from without. In an analytic manner, passage by passage, withoutGanim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 375 leaps, without discoveries, madness—by recovering its past and coordi- nating it with the present and by planning a series of specific resolu- tions—reveals its own logic. . . . The abolition of adventure is total; the mode of procedure is reversed to the reduction of an apparent ine plicable to an understanding of its signs. What is presented isa signifier that must be deciphered. .. . The “absurd” establishes itself in the intel- ligence: this is precisely what Baudelaire seized upon in Poe and made most profoundly his own. (64-5) The intransigence of the logic of Poe's heroes, for Cacciari, is also reflected in Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and its fullest expression is in Kafka, If Benjamin is willing to allow that Kafka offers usa “glimpse” of a solution to his mysteries, akin to the paradoxes of modern physics (63-4), Cacciari’s reading insists on the closed system of Kafka’s novels and their refusal to give us even that. For Cacciari, literature, like archi- tecture, performs its task when it divests us of, rather than provides us with, illusions, or hopes. Benjamin had a divided response to the city. In much recent writ- ing, however, the city has taken on a one-sided dystopic quality. For Bloomer, it is the image of Piranesi’s etchings of the Campo Marzio. For Cacciari it is Simmel’s remarkable es: y on the metropolis. The utopian urban village of Jane Jacobs, once an antidote to modernist planning, certainly has no place in this new dystopic vision, which received its classic formulation in Fredric Jameson’s essay on postmod- ernism. Hamon’s, Cacciari’s, and Bloomer’s books echo a study pub- lished ten years ago, one despite its classic status not cited nearly enough (though as far as I know it has not been translated into French or Italian): Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air.\2 Berman addresses the dystopianism of urban sociology by linking it not to the metropolis as a reified concept but to the destruction of human scale by urban renewal—which could be the plans of Huysmann and Peter the Great as well as Robert Moses. The dialectical potential of the city—toward metropolis and toward neighborhood —is historicized and structuralized in his readings both of cities and of writings about them. Berman's chief literary frame of reference is Dostoyevsky, and his prototypical encounter is the Nevsky Prospect. This reference 12 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: mon and Schuster, 1982).376 MLQ I September 1995 reveals Berman’s almost tragic reading of the urban text: a deep human yearning for community frustrated by an official dream of splendor and monumentality, and resulting in destruction or self- destruction. The subject of modernity is in fact what ties these books together, and the discourse of modernity allows them to discuss literature, archi- tecture, and urbanism in ways that transcend the relatively limited metaphorics of most previous studies. This comparative trope, that the architecture and literature of a period can be related or that literature is somehow essentially architectural, still is echoed in Hamon’s book to some extent, but by and large even his own argument undercuts the trope. In actual critical practice, efforts to demonstrate that these analogies have any extended analytic power have been frustrated, and there is in earlier studies an air of either strain or resignation. It would be possible to demonstrate on logical and historical grounds why, though that is not my present purpose: the analogies tend to be metaphors, with a certain heuristic and suggestive power on the one hand, and, on the other, the apparent qualities ascribed to either architectural or literary analysis can in fact be shown to have been bor- rowed from yet other disciplines or areas of endeavor. In any case, the best previous books about architecture and literature have typically begun with concrete and convincing descriptions of architecture or that follow sometimes urbanism, but the resultant literary analyse: seem to belong to different books. Simon Varey’s Space and the Eigh- teenth-Century English Novel exemplifies the challenge of actually apply- ing architectural theory and history to fiction, as opposed to nonfic- tion or reading fiction as journalistic description." After a detailed and informative account of eighteenth-century planning and architec- tural ideas, including an interesting analysis of how some of the most grandiose of those ideas never actually translated into the built ver- sions and were even contradicted by the actual buildings, he turns his attention briefly to a few canonical novels by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Surprisingly, he refus in the most general way, with the sophisticated description of the reg- ‘s then to connect these novels, except 13 Varey, Space and the Kighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 377 ularization of public space he has previously provided. As a result, his readings of the novels and their use of space could have proceeded without any of the “background” he invokes. Judith Fryer’s Felicitous Space is in many ways one of the more successful of these attempts to link architectural and literary forms.!* She builds on the work of archi- tectural historians such as Dolores Hayden to point out how the Amer- ican landscape and the idea of a building, often associated with male subjectivity and energies, were also imagined through female perspec- tives in late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century culture. Her readings of the inextricably linked architectural and literary forms in Edith Wharton, who, after all, wrote a book called The Decoration of Houses, particularly convincing. Yet again Fryer’s actual readings of texts seem to depend on a mythic critical perspective one would have thought to be precluded by her historical contexts. This is not to argue for a more rigorous historicism: Hamon, Cacciari, and Bloomer also engage in a sometimes hallucinatory free association. Yet the discourse of modernity (and postmodernity), which has achieved almost scholas- tic refinement over the past decade, also allows them to integrate their readings and their theses, to invoke a relatively creaky distinction. At the same time, the relatively limited historical range of the books under review, Piranesi and French romanticism notwithstanding, chal- lenges both the theory and the practice of the enterprise. To depend so entirely on the discourse of modernity excludes all that which cannot be categorized under the modern. If Benjamin was less Manichaeanis- tic than Simmel in his understanding of the city, at the same time the former’s work contains a notion of the archaic and the pretechnological that comes close to a version of pastoral. If we depend on Benjamin as much as recent scholarship does, how do we negotiate the architec- tural and the literary before the modern? If we accept the identity of consciousness and the metropolis as relatively unquestioned, how do we engage the considerable amount of interesting work on landscape and literature with the larger issues raised in these books? In the study of medieval literature, for instance, the traditional stress on the incipiently bourgeois city in literary history as the locus of \4 Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).378 MLQJI September 1995, cultural progress has been questioned. The “Brenner thesis,” captured most clearly in the title of Robert Brenner's article, “he Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” has propounded the agricultural coun- tryside as the continually dynamic force in the English economy through the eighteenth century.'> The literary impact of this transfor- mation is just being measured and is perhaps also exemplified best in the title of David Wallace’s article, “Chaucer and the Absent City.”!§ In early Renaissance scholarship the richest examinations of urban cul- ture have been those of processions and pageants, exploring how the late medieval and early modern city imagined itself through its civic rit- uals and how, to some extent, the city was organized around those rit- uals.!7 Medieval and Renaissance art histories increasingly have con- cerned themselves with how the art programs of their periods were meant to be read symbolically and experienced narratively. Perhaps the most fully realized synthesis of these directions has been Louise Fradenburg’s important study of how Edinburgh and its ruler imag- ined themselves as mutually defining.!8 As Raymond Williams's memo- rable description of The Country and the City argued, the opposition of city and country itself obscures powerful forces at work in both, and the legacy of his study has been felt in both Victorian and eighteenth- century studies.!? American studies as a field has been at times virtually a reified expression of one great theme—anti-urbanism and conquest of the land, a theme that has been recently reinvigorated by feminist scholarship. Some of the most successful recent work, such as Dana Brand’s Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, manage to bridge the gap by historicizing the flaneur.2° 19, H. Aston and G. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Struc- ture and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1985). 16 Wallace, “Chaucer and the Absent City,” in Chaucer's England: Literature in Its Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). ” Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn Ryerson, eds., Cily and Spectacte in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: Unive 8 Louise Olga Fradenburg, City Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). ‘8 Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 2 Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Ganim I Literature, Architecture, and Urbanism 379 These books represent a remarkable, but not entirely surprising, level of ferment on a subject of crucial importance. What is surprising is the relatively few venues for the conversation they represent to con- tinue, which is why series such as Rakatansky’s Theor ‘al Perspectives and the journal Any founded by Peter Eisenmann (as a sequel to the journal Oppositions) are of such consequence, despite their coterie tone. As both the natural landscape and the postmodern city in the late twentieth century find themselves locked in an apparently closed system of dependencies, and as both approach the limits of viabi the investigations represented by these studies are of more than “acad- emic” or belletristic interest. They represent a welcome contribution of theoretically informed scholarship into public intellectual life.Copyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing