Urban Visions, 1860-1940: Zola and Paris

Visions of the 19th / 20th Century Metropolis; Zola and Paris

Metropolitan Writing in the Age of Urbanisation (2)

Jason Finch, 2 October 2015

[warmer: Paris 1870s]

• 1. Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), oil painting, 2.39 m x 1.85 m, Art Institute of Chicago

• 2. Unknown photographer. View of Portland Road, London W11, chimney of the Notting Hill Brewery ahead (c.1935), photograph, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies centre, https://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/ruins-and-reconstruction-in-north-kensington/

Theoretical framework

• Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936): Geschellshaft (society) as opposed to Gemeinschaft (community)

• Spatial humanities– Critique; ‘theory’: Bakhtin, Lefebvre, Lotman, Foucault, Perec,

Harvey– Alliances between literary study and social sciences / empirical

study / policy research• Literary urban studies / urban cultural studies– City as distinct object of study (versus literary autonomy)– Literature and the Peripheral City (2015); Literary Second Cities

conference

Eras of mass urbanizationOnce the cultural and political beacon of the Arab world, Cairo is now close to becoming the region’s social sump. The population of this megalopolis has swollen to an estimated 17 million, more than half of whom live in the sprawling self-built neighbourhoods and shantytowns that ring the ancient heart of the city and its colonial-era quarters. Since the late 1970s, the regime’s liberalization policy—infitah, or ‘open door’—combined with the collapse of the developmentalist model, a deepening agrarian crisis and accelerated rural–urban migration, have produced vast new zones of what the French call ‘mushroom city’. The Arabic term for them al-madun al-‘ashwa’iyyah might be rendered ‘haphazard city’; the root means ‘chance’. These zones developed after the state had abandoned its role as provider of affordable social housing, leaving the field to the private sector, which concentrated on building middle and upper-middle-class accommodation, yielding higher returns. The poor took the matter into their own hands and, as the saying goes, they did it poorly.

-- Sabry Hafez, ‘The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form’, New Left Review 64 (2010),

London 1800-1850

• c.1820 to 1900: biggest city ever seen on earth• Fear but also excitement; misery and also freedom• Pierce Egan; Newgate novel; Condition of England

novel• Edwin Chadwick; Lord Shaftesbury• Visitors horrified: Flora Tristan, Fyodor Dostoevsky• Later: public health, suburbanization, Booth’s map,

media horrors (Jack the Ripper), the double standard

‘The privies, foul beyond description, were usually in the cellars; it was a common practice to have pigsties under the houses, too, and pigs roamed the streets once more, as they had not done for centuries in the larger towns’ [well, this was in certain quarters, Potteries and Piggeries: he seems squeamish, but he is closer to it than us]: ‘Cellars were used as dwelling places. In Liverpool, one-sixth of the population lived in “underground cellars,” and most of the other port cities were not far behind: London and New York were close rivals to Liverpool: even in the present decade [the 1930s] there were 20,000 basement dwellings in London medically marked as unfit for human habitation.’ [his italics]165-6: ‘[…] the combination of dark rooms and dank walls formed an almost ideal breeding medium for bacteria, especially since the overcrowded rooms afforded the maximum possibilities of transmission through breath and touch’. Lack of sanitation but ‘more sinister’ lack of water.

-- Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities

‘[…] we have already seen some aspects of the way of life of what contemporaries described as the “sunken sixth” of the people of London. We have seen how easily immigrants, in the bewilderment of their first arrival in London, could lose their previous norms of moral and domestic behaviour; how unemployment and destitution could reduce the labouring populace to living conditions of unimaginable filth and squalor, devoid of water or the basic necessities of sanitation, and exposed to correspondingly frightful rates of mortality; and we have seen how in the central districts of London extensive demolition of working-class housing for the building of railways and commercial undertakings was compressing the poor into ever more overcrowded slums, where all hope of escape to even the rudiments of civilized living was forgotten. “Nothing short of personal experience,” wrote George Godwin, who was not a sensationalist, “would have led us to believe in the frightful amount of ignorance, misery, and degradation which exists in this wealthy and luxurious city.”’

-- Francis Sheppard, London 1808-1871: The Infernal Wen (1971).

London, Dickens, early Dickens

• Later: the idea of squalor, slums, etc.• Dickens and class, reform, etc.• The history of his reputation• Influence: the comic, lively, varied urban

Thousands of enclosed courts

Left: the eastern end of Shelton Street, a surviving narrow court looking west from Drury Lane, London WC2, March 2015 (JF)

I’m not ashamed of myself. Snevellicci is my name. I’m to be found in Broad Court, Bow Street, when I’m in town. If I’m not in town, let any man ask for me at the stage door. Damme they know me at the stage door I suppose? Most have seen my portrait at the cigar shop round the corner.

(Nicholas Nickleby, Ch. XXX).

The Keeley Street site: Lundenwic and today’s London

In red, site of Broad Court, Mr Snevellicci’s ‘town’ address.

Source, Nigel Jeffries and Bruce Watson, ‘From Saxon Lundenwic to Victorian Rookery: Excavations at the City Lit, Keeley Street, London, WC2’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 63 (2014)

The Wild Court RookerySource, Jeffries and Watson (2014), recording excavations in 2004 (houses demolished in the 1870s)

Urban wilderness?

‘Stay,’ said the old man, beckoning him into a bye street, where they could converse with less interruption. ‘What d’ye mean, eh?’ ‘Merely that your kind face and manner—both unlike any I have ever seen—tempted me into an avowal, which, to any other stranger in this wilderness of London, I should not have dreamed of making,’ returned Nicholas. ‘Wilderness! Yes it is, it is. Good! It is a wilderness,’ said the old man with much animation. ‘It was a wilderness to me once. I came here barefoot. I have never forgotten it. Thank God!’ and he raised his hat from his head, and looked very grave.Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Ch. 35

Tasks

• Get the Zola; contact me when you have it• Form groups/pairs for group presentation task• Read the Zola• Get and begin Manhattan Transfer: again, contact me

when you are underway or if you have problems• Theory reading: Tambling in Literature and the

Peripheral City [JF to circulate]• Prepare (divide): C19 Paris; Zola; other writers of C19

Paris; Baudelaire, Benjamin and the flâneur figure [you to tell me who presents which]

‘Modern’ novelist and shock-horror approach

Left: The Mysteries of Paris (1842-1843) by Eugène Sue; below, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), translated into French by Charles Baudelaire (below), 1850s

Zola and Paris

• The arcades: Baudelaire, Benjamin and the flâneur figure

• The Passage du Pont-Neuf: 6th Arondissement• ‘Naturalism’: biology, lack of human agency• Naturalism domesticating the Gothic: Nancy

Armstrong• The English Zolaesque; Zola in England: outrage,

law cases, Henry Viztelly (1870s) to Thomas Burke (1910s)

Naturalism

• Psychology: but no thoughts; governed by cause and effect; (body and soul) all body; no agency

• Temprament: sanguine (Laurent), nervous (Thérèse)

• Les Rougon-Macquart (series of novels): quasi-scientific experiment

• Crisis of faith: positivism (Comte), Darwin, etc.

The Passage in the Novel

• Passage du Pont-Neuf: demolished 1912

• Opening paragraphs of the novel: paving stones’ ‘acrid dampness’ glass roof ‘black with grime’

• Killing of the cat, FrançoisAbove: The Passage du Pont-Neuf (http://autourduperetanguy.blogspirit.com/archive/2007/03/09/paris-disparu-le-passage-du-pont-neuf.html)

Morgue

• Details of bodies• Camille as almost already dead before the kill

him• Visual: colour arrangements• Freakshow; popular entertainment; urban

thrill; lust and horror combined• Morality tale?• Reduced / removed humanity: Mme Raquin

Readings

• Novel as diagnosis of social ills and history-writing: Zola’s own Les Rougon-Macquart cycle (20 novels, 1871-1893, set 1851-1870)

• Naturalism and alienation: Benjamin to Keunen (a socio-psychological reading)

• Tambling: fiction rewrites city through (Lotman) its dynamic peripheries acting on the centre: a more (critical) geographical reading

For next time

• More on Zola and Paris: read Jeremy Tambling in Literature and the Peripheral City (I will circulate); find out about history of Paris, Haussmann, Zola’s career.

• Dos Passos and New York. Fragments, languages; history of New York.