Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet via Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”

Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

via Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”Ana Cristina Mendes

University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies

Modernity

“an imaginary and continuously shifting site of

global/local claims, commitments, and

knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues

about the place of those who move in and out

of categories of otherness” (Rofel 3)

Other modernities (Rofel 1999)

Understandings of “modernity” Rofel iswriting against

Modernity arose discretely in the West and then was simply mimicked in the rest of the world.

Modernity leads to the same practices and effects everywhere one finds it. Through globalization, modernity makes the world homogenous.

Understandings of“modernity” Rofel proposes

Modernity is a story people tellthemselves (an imaginary) about themselves in relation to others.

Modernity entails disjunctures. The experiences of peoplecaught up by modernity’s“enchantment” do not alwaysfit smoothly and cleanly intothe narrative.

Salman Rushdie

Nicole Bengiveno/New York Times

Salman Rushdie in the arched underpass near Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.

(Cohen, Patricia. “Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras.” New York Times May 25, 2008.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/25cohe.html>.)

“Outside a photographic studio in south London, the famous Avedon backdrop of bright white paper awaits, looking oddly like an absence: a blank space in the world. (…) In Avedon’s portrait gallery, his subjects are asked to occupy, and define, a void”

(Rushdie “On Being Photographed” 113)

Richard Avedon, Salman Rushdie, 1995

Rushdie and (the anxiety of) representation

“There is something predatory about all photography.”

(Rushdie “On Being Photographed” 113)

“I remember Lord Snowdon rearranging all the furniture

in my house, gathering bits of ‘Indianness’ around me: a

picture, a hookah. The resulting picture is one I have

never cared for: the writer as exotic. Sometimes

photographers come to you with a picture already in their

heads, and then you’re done for.” (115)

Rushdie and (the anxiety of) representation

In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie

was interested in “writ[ing] about the business

of representation, the business of image-

making, about what it is to take a picture of

the world, what it is to (…) walk up to the

world and take its photograph” (Kadzis 226).

Rai Merchant:the photographer/narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Inspired by his father’s “collection of old photographs of the edifices and objets of the vanished city” (79), and by his “Paillard Bolex, Rolleiflex and Leica, [as well as his] collection of the works of Dayal and Haseler” (155).

Rolleiflex medium format camera

Rai Merchant:the photographer/narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Photography is [his] way of understanding the world” (210), i.e. the complex realities of Bombay

Influenced by the urban photographers Niépce, Talbot, Nadar, Atget and Man Ray (222)

Raghubir Singh, Bazaar through Glass Door, Bombay, 1989

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833)

One of Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photographs, circa 1826.

“Let us now praise unjustly neglected men. The first permanent photograph was taken in 1826, in Paris, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but his place in our collective memory has been usurped by his later collaborator, Daguerre (…). Truly, a father of the New.

What was it like, that First Photograph, forerunner of the Age of the Image? Technically: a direct positive image on a treated pewter plate, requiring many long hours of exposure time. Its subject: nothing more elevated than the view from the Nicéphorean workroom window. (…) All is dull, still, dim. No hint here that this is the first quiet note of what will become a thundering symphony, or it may be more honest to say a deafening cacophony. But (I switch metaphors in my excitement) a floodgate has been opened, an unstoppable torrent of pictures is to follow, haunting and forgettable, hideous and beautiful, pornographic and revelatory, pictures that will create the very idea of the Modern (…).”

(GBF 209-210)

“Niépce, I bow my head to you. Great Nicéphore, I doff my beret. If Daguerre—like the Titan Epimetheus—was the one who opened this Pandoran box, unleashing the ceaseless click and snap, the interminable flash and sprocket of photography, still it was you, great Anarch!, who stole the gods’ gift of permanent vision, of the transformation of sight into memory, of the actual into the eternal—that is, the gift of immortality—and bestowed it upon mankind. Where are you now, O Titanic seer, Prometheus of film? If the gods have punished you, if you’re chained to a pillar high up on an Alp while a vulture munches your guts, take comfort in the news. This just in: the gods are dead, but photography is alive & kicking. Olympus? Pah! It’s just a camera now.” (GBF 209-210)

Niépce

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)

The Boulevards of Paris, 1843

Felix “Nadar” Tournachon (1820-1910)

Daguerre, 1844

Felix “Nadar” Tournachon (1820-1910)

Charles Baudelaire, 1863

Felix “Nadar” Tournachon (1820-1910)

Autoportrait dans les catacombes, 1861

Felix “Nadar” Tournachon (1820-1910)

“Nadar’s superiority to his colleagues is shown by his attempt to take photographs in the Paris sewer system: for the first time, the lens was deemed capable of making discoveries.”

(Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 35)

The sewers of Paris, 1861-1862

(Benjamin The Arcades Project 413)

Eugène Atget (1857-1927)

Un Coin, Rue de Seine 1924

Eugène Atget (1857-1927)

The Galerie Vivienne, 1907

(Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings:

Volume 3: 1935-1938. 1.)

Eugène Atget (1857-1927)

Magasin, avenue des Gobelins, 1925

“He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift. And thus such pictures, work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship”

(Benjamin “Little History of Photography” 518)

Man Ray (1890-1976)

La Ville: From the Portfolio Electricité, 1931 Eiffel Tower at Night, 1930

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Modernity and phantasmagoria

“The world dominated by its phantasmagorias – this (…) is ‘modernity’”.

(Benjamin “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” 1939. 26)

“… the new forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. (…) Thus appear the arcades—first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flâneur, who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace.”

(14)

Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891)

Gordon Gahan/Photo Researchers, Inc.

“As Prefect of the Seine (1853-1870) under Napoleon III, Haussmann inaugurated and carried through a large-scale renovation of Paris, which included the modernization of sanitation, public utilities, and transportation facilities, and which necessitated the demolition of many old Parisian neighborhoods and many arcades built in the first half of the century.”

(note 44, Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 48)

Haussmanization

“Haussmann gave himself the title of

‘demolition artist,’ artiste démolisseur. He

viewed his work as a calling (…). Meanwhile

he estranges the Parisians from their city.

They no longer feel at home there, and start

to become conscious of the inhuman

character of the metropolis.”(Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 42)

“Panoramas were large circular tableaux, usually displaying scenes of battles and cities, painted in trompe l’oeil and originally designed to be viewed from the center of a rotunda.”

(note 11, Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 45)

A Panorama under construction

(Benjamin The Arcades Project 529)

Flâneur

“In the panoramas, the city opens out, becoming landscape—as it

will do later, in subtler fashion, for the flâneurs.” (Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 35)

“For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject

of lyric poetry. (…) It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still

conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the

big-city dweller. The flâneur still stands on the threshold of the

metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet.

In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd.”

(Benjamin “Paris, the Capital” 39)

“Bombay, that great metropolitan creation of the British”

(GBF 31)

Map of Mumbai Bruno Barbey, View of central Bombay, with its mix of skyscrapers and Indo-Victorian architecture,1980

Modernity

“When I was growing up in Bombay, there wasn't a single skyscraper in town. In fact, I remember the first skyscraper being built on Malabar Hill; the people in the city used to contemptuously refer to it as Matchbox House because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its side. We all told each other that it would never catch on. One of the many things about which we were wrong.” (Rushdie in Nagarajan)

“The destruction of your childhood home—a villa, a city—is like the death of a parent: an orphaning. A tombstone ‘scraper’ stands upon the site of this forgotten cremation. A tombstone city stands upon the graveyard of the lost." (GBF 168)

An old palatial villa at Bandra (Dwivedi and Mehrotra Bombay: The Cities Within 224)

““Skyscraper,” she named it. “How’d you like to own a penthouse at the top?” Skywhatter? Where was a penthouse pent? These were words I did not know. I found myself disliking them: the words, and the building to which they belonged. (…)

“Looks like a big matchbox to me.” I shrugged. “Live in it? As if.”

(…) “You don’t know anything” (…). “Just wait on and see. One day they’ll be all over the place.” (…) “They’ll be here,” she waved an arm gaily. “All along here.” That set me off too. “Beachscrapers,” I said. “Sandscrapers,” she agreed. “Camelscrapers, cocoscrapers, fishscrapers.” (…) “And I suppose chowscrapers at Chowpatty Beach,” I wondered. “And hillscrapers on Malabar Hill. And on Cuffe Parade?”

“Cuffescrapers,” laughed my mother. (…)

“Where are you going to put them, anyway?” Emboldened by her good humour, I delivered an unanswerable last word on the subject. “Here, nobody’ll want them, and in town, there are houses everywhere already.”

“No room, then,” she mused, pensively.

“Exactly,” I confirmed, turning towards the water. “No room at all.”” (GBF 64)

“the ‘scrapers,’ the giant concrete-and-steel exclamations that destroyed forever the quieter syntax of the old city of Bombay” (GBF 154)

Many bungalows at Chowpatty and on Malabar Hill were demolished in the 1950s. (Dwivedi and Mehrotra Bombay: The Cities Within 224)

Bombay as Panorama

“This modern panoramic view was to be judged by the standards of (…) efficiency, functionality, and optimality without the permanence and continuities of history or the imposition and weight of past models.” (Boyer 45). Cf. V.V. Merchant’s Bombay as Work of Art

“Everywhere the architect and city planner cut the fabric into discrete units and recomposed them into a structured and utopian whole: disorder was replaced by functional order, diversity by serial repetition, and surprise by uniform expectancy.” (Boyer 46)

Haussmann,

“demolition artist”

(Benjamin “Paris, the

Capital” 42)

Ameer

Merchant, “the

master builder”

(Rushdie GBF 79)

Haussumannization

of Paris

Ameerization of

Bombay

Bombay/Wombay

“When you grow up, as I did, in a great city; during what just happens to be its golden age, you think of it as eternal. Always was there, always will be. The grandeur of the metropolis creates the illusion of permanence. The peninsular Bombay into which I was born certainly seemed perennial to me. Colaba Causeway was my Via Appia, Malabar and Cumballa hills were our Capitol and Palatine, the Brabourne Stadium was our Colosseum, and as for the glittering Art Deco sweep of Marine Drive, well, that was something not even Rome could boast.” (GBF 78)

Completed by the late 1930s, Marine Drive, the “Queen's Necklace”, became the most splendid sea-side promenade in Bombay. (Dwivedi and Mehrotra Bombay: The Cities Within 222)

Marine Drive

Paolo Pellegrin, The waterfront in Marine drive, one of the richest areas in Bombay, 2005

Marine Drive

Sebastião Salgado “Marina Drive,” where the poor sleep waiting for the distribution of food, 1995

(India: A Celebration 195)

Marine Drive

Ketaki Sheth, Sleeping Man, Marine Drive, 1989 (Bombay Mix 96)

“It was from my father that I learned of Bombay’s first great photographers, Raja Deen Dayal and A. R. Haseler, whose portraits of the city became my first artistic influences, if only by showing me what I did not want to do. Dayal climbed the Rajabai tower to create his sweeping panoramas of the birth of the city; Haseler went one better and took to the air. Their images were awe-inspiring, unforgettable, but they also inspired in me a desperate need to get back down to ground level. From the heights you see only pinnacles.” (GBF 80)

Mumbadevi Street, photographed by Raja Deen

Dayal [1844-1910] in the late 1880s (Dwivedi and

Mehrotra Bombay: The Cities Within 48)

“I yearned for the city streets, the knife grinders, the water carriers, the Chowpatty pickpockets, the pavement moneylenders, the peremptory soldiers, the whoring dancers, the horse-drawn carriages with their fodder-thieving drivers, the railway hordes, the chess players in the Irani restaurants, the snake-buckled schoolchildren, the beggars, the fishermen, the servants, the wild throng of Crawford Market shoppers, the oiled wrestlers, the moviemakers, the dockers, the book sewers, the urchins, the cripples, the loom operators, the bully boys, the priests, the throat slitters, the frauds. I yearned for life.” (GBF 80)

Raghubir Singh, Ganpati immersion, Chowpatty, n/d (Bombay: Gateway of India 116)

Carl De Keyze, Bombay. Chowpatty beach, 1985

“I seized for myself the maelstrom of straw

baskets at Crawford Market, and took

possession, too, of the inert figures who were

everywhere, sleeping on the hard pillows of

the sidewalks, their faces turned towards

urinous walls, beneath the lurid movie

posters of buxom goddesses with sofa-

cushion lips.” (GBF 212)

the maelstrom of straw baskets at Crawford Market

Sebastião Salgado, The Crawford Market, 1995 (India: A Celebration 208-209)

the maelstrom of straw baskets at Crawford Market

Raghubir Singh, Crawford Market, 1993

the inert figures who were everywhere, sleeping on the hard pillows of

the sidewalks, their faces turned towards urinous walls, beneath the

lurid movie posters of buxom goddesses with sofa-cushion lips

Alex Webb, Movie poster, 1981

beneath the lurid movie posters of buxom goddesses with sofa-cushion lips

Bruno Barbey INDIA. Bombay, 1980. In a slum quarter of Bombay, old billboards are used as roofs for shanty houses.

beneath the lurid movie

posters of buxom

goddesses with sofa-

cushion lips

Steve McCurry, Rita Joseph Das cooking rice

and lentils on the street, 1994

“It was easy to be a lazy photographer in Bombay. It was easy to take an interesting picture and almost impossible to take a good one. The city seethed, gathered to stare, turned its back and didn’t care. By showing me everything it told me nothing. Wherever I pointed my camera (…) I seemed to glimpse something worth having, but usually it was just something excessive: too colourful, too grotesque, too apt. The city was expressionistic, it screamed at you, but it wore a domino mask.” (GBF 212)

“There were whores, tightrope walkers, transsexuals, movie stars, cripples, billionaires, all of them exhibitionists, all of them obscure. There was the thrilling, appalling infinity of the crowd at Churchgate Station in the morning, but that same infinity made the crowd unknowable; there were the fish being sorted on the pier at the Sassoon dock, but all the activity showed me nothing: it was just activity. (…) There was too much money, too much poverty, too much nakedness, too much disguise, too much anger, too much vermilion, too much purple.” (GBF 212)

There was the thrilling, appalling infinity of the crowd at Churchgate Station in

the morning, but that same infinity made the crowd unknowable

Sebastião Salgado, Church Gate Terminus Station of the Western Railroad Line, 1995 (India: A Celebration 210)

there were the fish being sorted on the pier at the Sassoon dock, but

all the activity showed me nothing: it was just activity

Sebastião Salgado, Sassoon docks, the main port of arrival for fishing boats to Bombay, 1995 (India: A Celebration 215)

There was too much money, too much poverty

Sebastião Salgado, The shantytown of Mahim. A pipeline passes through the middle of the slum, bringing drinking water to the rich parts of the city, 1995 (India: A Celebration 213)

too much poverty

Sebastião Salgado, The shantytown of Dharavy, one of the two largest shantytowns of Asia, Bombay, 1995 (India: A Celebration207)

Bombay as Exhibition?

An objectified “East” turned into “a place of

spectacle and visual arrangement” (Mitchell

297)?