Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Topophrenia: The Place of the Subject / Robert T. Tally Jr.

<1> Place seems so simple - commonplace, in fact - yet the concept lies at the heart not only of rather complex geographic theory and practice, but also, arguably, of the arts, humanities, and sciences as a whole. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his magisterial Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, establishes a powerfully spatiotemporal dynamic in which a place becomes distinctive, and this dynamic lends significance to all human experience of the world. For Tuan, a discrete or recognizable portion of otherwise undifferentiated space becomes a place when it occasions a pause, a resting of the eye, at which point that now distinctive spot becomes imbued with value and meaning. It thus becomes the province of literary art, subject to interpretation, as well as to affective appreciation and power. [1] If place is understood in terms of a pause, a moment of rest, then space is associated with movement, and likewise associated with that freedom but also peril that comes from being away from a home or being on the move. "From the security and stability of place, we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice-versa." [2] In this somewhat phenomenological conception, the individual subject establishes a place through his or her experience and perception, while simultaneously being subject to a place and to the space, abstract or diffuse, against which it is defined. Place is profoundly subjective, but it is also a form of subjection.

<2> A place is not quite the same as a territory, whose tortuous history of shifting relations of power and knowledge is illuminated in Stuart Elden's brilliant genealogy The Birth of Territory, but a place is frequently also a surprisingly dense ensemble of crystallized social relations. [3] These relations might be disclosed in the everyday memories or experiences of individuals or groups who inhabit such places, and they may represent a skein of intersecting historical events, narratives, traumas, and so on. In his Place: A Short Introduction, Tim Cresswell acknowledges both the simplicity and the complexity of the concept, while exploring the many ways in which place or places have been understood by various spatial theorists and critics. One distinction that stands out is the difference between an abstract understanding of a given locus and the richer, but messier apprehension of the place as experienced or lived. Cresswell illustrates the point by observing that the geographically definite marker "40.46 degrees North, 73.58 degrees West" does not mean much to most people, but the referent of these coordinates - New York City, or midtown Manhattan - conjures up a host of images. Pressing further into the analysis of the place, one discovers narratives without limit, social history, cultural traditions, political conflicts, artistic forms, and on and on. [4] Hence, location itself is not necessarily meaningful, at least not to all, but a given place, recognized as such, contains such a plenum of meaning so vast as to be nearly overwhelming for an interpreter. This has been almost comically proven by Georges Perec in his Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, in which the writer tries to take note of every person and incident visible to him at a bustling intersection of Place Saint-Sulpice over the course of three days. [5] This is also why, in Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, the insoluble problem of the corpus haunts any effort to perform a comprehensive, geo-centered interpretation. [6] With a nearly infinite number of potential impressions of a particular place at our disposal, at what point does the geocritic feel comfortable that the body of work has achieved some adequate representation? Where does one even begin? How does one end?

<3> One approach, certainly, involves a reliance on the subjective experience of space and place that Tuan discusses. In many respects, this remains egocentric - as opposed to Westphal's geocentric methodology - but it allows a reader to explore the place as perceived or as experienced, without necessarily straining to achieve a quasi-scientific, categorical knowledge of the place. The admittedly artificial limits upon a corpus or upon the object under scrutiny need not be debilitating, and it is often quite productive. Focusing on a single author or single text, for instance, can enable a range of creative interpretations that may be productive of others. Hence, a geocritical exploration might well take as its starting point a particular text and its relation to a place, whose almost unavoidable polysemy and heteroglossia will assure that any reading of the text, place, and relations among them, will exceed simple biographical experience (as if that were possible to pin down either). [7] The problem of place, in this sense, becomes a larger problematic: it is a grand assemblage of problems to be grappled with by the reader and writer. This subjective limit then opens up a plus ultra for subsequent, if not endless, exploration.

<4> A key element of such geocritical explorations has been the affective geography made visible through a given subject's own experience with and in places. In an earlier study, Tuan had coined an evocative term, topophilia, in order to represent succinctly "all of the human being's affective ties to the material environment." As Tuan explains, these ties

differ greatly in intensity, subtlety, and mode of expression. The response to environment may be primarily aesthetic: it may then vary from the fleeting pleasure one gets from a view to the equally fleeting but far more intense sense of beauty that is suddenly revealed. The response may be tactile, a delight in the feel of air, water, earth. More permanent and less easy to express are feelings that one has toward a place because it is home, a locus of memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood. [8]

In Tuan's joyous phenomenology, places are endowed with deeply personal and subjective meanings. They are invested with profoundly affective or emotional content for the subject that perceives, moves about, and in the broadest sense inhabits those spaces which have become demarcated and identified as places. Topophilia, or the love of place, seems an appropriate concept for one who so revels in the sensuous geographies of place, to use Paul Rodaway's suggestive formulation. [9]

<5> Tuan's sunny view of topophilia - literally sunny, it seems, since he takes as his Ansatzpunkt a personal memory of a stunning sunrise he witnessed while camping under the open skies in Death Valley - is delightful, yet one cannot help feeling that this perspective on space ignores the more angst-ridden or menacing features of certain places. If "home" is somehow understood to be a topophilic space, then what of the unhomely spaces in which an alienated subject experiences the cartographic anxiety or sense of bewilderment that so typifies many literary representations of space? [10] Like so many Dantes, exiled from our metaphysical or real homes, we subjected subjects often find ourselves in a selva oscura, quite unable to take pleasure in the visceral sensuality of the place or to marvel at its supernal beauty. In Heidegger's Being and Time, for example, angst is brought into direct relation to one's sense of place: "In anxiety one feels 'uncanny' [unheimlich]. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the 'nothing and nowhere.' But here 'uncanniness' also means 'not-being-at-home' [das Nicht-zuhause-sein]." [11] I have always taken this to be an apt description of the more quotidian anxiety one associates with being lost, but one can also see how even familiar places might engender in the subject feelings of fear and loathing. Topophobia seems the more apt label for the experiences so many people have with so many places. Or, perhaps, a sort of misotopia could characterize those places we hate, such as those circles of living Hell comprising shopping malls and the like. Affective geography must also account for painful or unpleasant emotional responses to places and spaces, presumably.

<6> Proliferating neologisms aside, it appears that a crucial consideration of any properly spatial literary studies is the pervasive sense of, not only place, but of placemindedness, which characterizes both the subjective experience and the artistic representation of places, persons, events, and so forth. Fredric Jameson's sense that narrative is the central function or instance of the human mind" [12], perhaps, is here to be supplemented with the proposition that any such narrative function be understood as itself a form of mapping, which is what I have in mind with the conception of literary cartography. [13] Traditionally, the primacy accorded by narrative criticism and theory to the temporal dimension, with the unfolding of events over time, has sometimes left the more discernibly spatial aspects of narrative to be either ignored entirely, downplayed as a mere backdrop, or reified into a static category, as with certain variations of regionalism or nationalism that condition, if not determine, the text's significance a priori. [14] Yet the dynamic spatiotemporal relations among subject, situation, representation, and interpretation invite critical approaches to literature that are sensitive to the uncertain, often shifting, but always pertinent ways that place haunts the mind.

<7> Along these lines, one might propose topophrenia as a provisional label for that condition of narrative, one that is necessary to any reading or writing of a text, in which the persistence of place and of the subject's relation to it must be taken into account. Such placemindedness is not to be understood as a simplistic relation between a given writer and his or her distinctive place (Thoreau at Walden Pond, for example), although any careful analysis of such a relationship would almost certainly disclose that things are not really that simple after all (as when, for instance, the topographic lines of Thoreau's Walden extend or reach dead-ends, intersect with others, proliferate, combine, and establish new lines entirely). Rather, topophrenia suggests the degree to which all thinking is, in various ways, thinking about place, thinking about the relations among places, as well as those among subjects and places, in the broadest possible sense. This is not so much a geographical unconscious as an existential comportment toward the world, but it also creates problems as well as opportunities for spatial literary criticism. Topophrenia characterizes the subjective engagement with a given place, with one's sense of place, and with the possible projection of alternative spaces.

<8> One experiences the visceral force of this topophrenia in Wendy Chin-Tanner's poem, "On Truth in a Nonmoral Sense." Readers will recognize the allusion to Nietzsche's brief 1873 essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne), and Chin-Tanner includes as an epigraph Nietzsche's well-known assertion at the end of that essay that the truth is nothing more than "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people." [15] In Chin-Tanner's stunning poetic meditation on this Nietzschean "truth," she bodies forth an entire critique of the human sciences, while inviting us to experience the haunting of places - which are themselves haunts, of course - by a kind of irrepressible subjectivity.

In sociology, we say mapping,
we say cartography instead

of understanding. To profess
to understand, you see, is hubris.

I am a professional digger. I
should say excavation or archeology

instead of digging for the truth,
which is uncouth. Which is emotional.

And, again, hubris. We should never say
truth. What is the truth, anyway? Instead,

we should say subjectivity, as in: To what
are we subjected? Or: What is the subject

of the story of your life? To name it,
I say loss, I say yearn, I say tell me.

What else can I say? In fall, before
the surgery, we walked, the sky the color

of pigeons. I listened to you breathe, the soft
wheezing. I listened to the sound of your shoes

shuffling, crunching dead leaves into the ground.
I thought I would lose you. How could I betray

you by mapping these cities so far away:
Paris, Prague, Vienna, Kiev? How could

they hurt us? These faint cartographies
drawn in traces of my DNA, and names,

the names escaping me over time and sea
poetically in slant, half, off, and straight

rhymes. I could never escape you. Before
us, our name stands constant, and the City stands

constantly shifting, like truth. Like words and meaning,
making meaningless the crude facts of my making. [16]

Here, one might say, place becomes less a locale, less a localizable or even recognizable site, and more a subtle whirlwind of affective, cognitive, and experiential data. The inability to determine the true meaning of the place is countered by the literary act of significance, the poet's own mapping of the places that help to constitute her own subjectivity. As in Nietzsche, the humbling of scientific reason does not augur some ultimately meaningless existence, but rather becomes a step toward unleashing forces of active, creative, speculative thought. [17] The work of art, in this case, forms a map even as it implicitly criticizes the hubris of the cartographic endeavor. One cannot know the place, in that older sense, but one can make available a kind of knowledge of self through one's patient, meticulous, and topophrenic activity. A literary cartography emerges as a figuration of subjective experience and objective space, affective geographies combined with abstract principles, forming a sort of constellation by which the poet can navigate her world … and, perhaps, even change it. [18]

<9> This special section, Spatial Literary Studies II: Problematics of Place, is devoted to this sort of broadly geocritical exploration. Each of the articles in this section takes up the problematic of place and subjectivity, although the approaches and conclusions vary quite a bit. As I discussed in my introduction to the previous special issue, the diversity of methods, texts, interpretations, and theories is an indication of both the breadth of spatial literary studies and the variety of critical approaches available to critics working in these areas. [19] In this section, what unites the diverse examples of a spatially oriented criticism is a sustained consideration of place in connection to the authors, texts, and contexts being analyzed. As becomes clear, place is a problem, or a set of problems, without simple solutions, yet all of the works under review are characterized by a sort of topophrenic engagement, which considered the subject of place and the place of the subject.

<10> The section opens with Walter Bosse's "'Oh, man, I'm nowhere': Ralph Ellison and the Psychospatial Terrain of Mid-Century Harlem," which explores the theoretical contours of Ralph Ellison's 1948 essay, "Harlem Is Nowhere." Bosse argues that Ellison's text theorizes space in a way that enables resistance against the geopolitical constraints of urban black modernity. Bosse shows how, in "Harlem is Nowhere," Ellison explores the underground halls of the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem, "the only center in the city wherein both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care." [20] Ellison thus situates racial politics within a specific institutional milieu. At Lafargue, Ellison works as a kind of ethnographer, and records that the utterance "I'm nowhere" was commonly used by patients as an answer to the simple question, "How are you?" Of course, this response articulates the emotional and psychological severity of life in Harlem at midcentury, but it does so in fascinating and complex ways. The phrase "I'm nowhere" not only acknowledges the constraints working against an individual's subjectivity, it also shows the respondent taking hermeneutical control over the terms of her or his existence. The respondent actively construes an ontological question and, in turn, gives it geographical and phenomenological consideration. He communicates a personal condition in expressly spatial terms. Further, by embracing "nowhere" as a category of lived experience, the Harlemites circumvent the center-periphery binary that perpetuates social marginality; they thereby construct an alternative space filled with potential. As Bosse concludes, the concept of being "nowhere" provides a new way of articulating displacement as a central moment in the history of the black Atlantic, and the function of "nowhere" as a potentially liberating signifier provides a unique opportunity to view the black vernacular through the lens of spatial theory.

<11> Moving from "nowhere" to a "non place," Chris Margrave offers a fascinating reading of a key author's own sense of place in "Covington is 'The Non Place for Me': Walker Percy's Topophilia in the 'Desert of Theory and Consumption'." Margrave observes that, through Percy's commitment to living an incarnational artistic life in the "non-place" of Covington, Louisiana, the novelist created a locus of being from which he explored the deranged abstractions and entertainments found in what he termed the desert of theory and consumption. While many articles about and interviews with Percy address his reasons for embedding himself in the Deep South, Margrave argues that few critics have explained how Percy's justification for choosing his geographical residence informs his artistic production. In his light-hearted essay, "Why I Live Where I Live," Percy explores upon the ideas of placement, non-placement, and misplacement, concepts which critics rightly contextualize as terms Percy inherited from Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Camus, among others. Employing Gaston Bachelard's influential Poetics of Space, Margrave reads Percy's non-fiction essays on place to illustrate how Percy's celebration of Covington reveals the generative source for his unapologetic expression of artistic and religious being. In the way Percy sacralizes the "ordinary Wednesday afternoon" in his adopted hometown as holy in time and space, Percy participates in an inscape of place that enacts for his pilgrim soul an existential and religious homecoming.

<12> In "Alfred Hitchcock's The Rear Window: Cold War, Spatiality, and the Paranoid Subject," Beatrice Köhler addresses a different sort of place, one less attached to a given toponym and more situated in the multiple registers of the scopophilic subject, from the voyeuristic individual to an entire geopolitical system of surveillance and control. Köhler investigates the notion of an identifiable "Cold War culture" by discussing Hitchcock's 1954 classic Rear Window, focusing especially on spatiality and paranoia. The cinematic screen is seen as a site where socio-cultural conflict is negotiated and political reality is transcoded into fictional narratives. Extending beyond the body of criticism that discusses the movie as a prime example of scopophilia and cinematic self-reflexivity, Köhler attempts to combine extradiegetic politics with intradiegetic aesthetics. Emerging from a culture of McCarthyite furor, post-war anxieties regarding the millions of soldiers returning from WWII, and increasing governmental infringement on privacy, Rear Window investigates the politics of suspicion, surveillance, and individual agency by displacing these issues unto multiple imaginary screens that are subject to a paranoid misreading symptomatic of the American 1950s.

<13> Next, Will Cunningham examines the liminal spaces of Toni Morrison's celebrated novel in "Contesting Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Morrison dedicates Beloved to the "Sixty Million and more" captured, displaced, and murdered Africans whose physical lives and cultural identity were terminated amidst the transatlantic slave trade. In Cunningham's reading, Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the story of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence, a complex, industrial, and capitalistic endeavor that specifically targeted black identity. The hold of the slave ship could be viewed as a precursor to more familiar, albeit less violent, modern spaces that might be demarcated as placeless: international airport terminals and borders, refugee camps, and military detention prisons. As Cunningham reads them, these locations all occupy that liminal space between opposing binaries; this space is the "third-space," the borderland, the indefinable, a temporary and fluctuating zone governed by both regulatory and lawless forces. But such a place is never a totally abstracted, passive, or static locus. Even where identity is uprooted, the processes of re-visioning and remembering invoke the spatiality of the borderland. This tension between a space created by the material manifestations of power and the performances of identity within and through these movements of capital reveals an acute, revelatory convergence of spatial and racial identity formation. Cunningham argues that reading the confluence of space and race allows us to see in Morrison's work a critical mass of dispossessed humanity embroiled in constant relations of subversion and contestation.

<14> Finally, in "Remapping the Present: Dave Eggers's Spatial Virtuality and the Condition of Literature," Nathan Frank addresses the spatial turn in literary studies by way of a parallel turn in virtual theory. Surveying and synthesizing the many invaluable contributions to conceptualizing virtuality, from those of Bergson and Deleuze to those of Daniel Downes and Brian Massumi, Frank asserts that a "spatial virtuality" accounts for an increasing focus on digitization without dismissing the previous (and, at times, prescient) preoccupations with temporal virtualities. Frank also frames spatial virtuality in terms of N. Katherine Hayles's compelling work in which virtuality is a condition. Within such a framework, many things happen, not the least of which is a sustained meditation on an information-materiality dialectic, wherein two sub-dialectics are housed: that of pattern-randomness (information), and that of presence-absence (materiality). In Frank's argument, virtuality as a spatial condition comports with the classic tropes of power and literature, namely, circles and stories about circles. Looking at two novels by Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King and The Circle, Frank interrogates how a reappropriation of Judith Anderson's intertext, as a condition of potentiality and relationship, might provide the substance of that which is present without being local. In this way, "spatial virtuality" and "a condition of literature" suggest that language and texts are the presence around which information and material bodies congregate, offering new ways forward in exploring the discourses surrounding virtuality.

<15> From the visceral experience of a haunted or beloved place to an abstract (but no less visceral?) engagement with virtual spaces of postmodernity, the essays in this section grapple with the topophrenia of various artists, writers, and theorists whose own cultural cartographies appear to open up or disclose new spaces even as they attempt the map the distinctive places under consideration. The fascination with place is a sign of our uneasy, all too necessary relationship with space, as we - like Chin-Tanner - "scan the horizon for a still spot." [21] This still spot, Tuan's pause, the site that delights, disturbs, enraptures, and haunts, is the place one might give a name to, investing it with subjective meanings while subjecting it to analytical scrutiny. Caught as we are always in the middest, amid the complex and oscillatory relations of power and knowledge, the geocritic may nevertheless attempt to achieve a sense of place, so long as it is understood to be provisional, contingent, and subject to perpetual modification. [22] Like a map, in fact.

Notes

[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 161-162.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] See Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

[4] Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 2-3.

[5] See Georges Perec, Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, Mass.: Wakefield Press, 2010).

[6] Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 117; see also my Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 143-145.

[7] See, e.g., my essay, "A Geocriticism of the Worldly World," the foreword to Westphal, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps, trans. Amy D. Wells (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

[8] Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1974], 93.

[9] See Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place (London: Routledge, 1994).

[10] On "cartographic anxiety," see Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Balckwell, 1994), 70-73.

[11] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 233, bracketed terms in original.

[12] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 13, 123.

[13] See my "Mapping Narratives," the introduction to Robert T. Tally Jr., ed., Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1-12.

[14] See Westphal, Geocriticism, especially 9-36.

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1977), 46-47.

[16] Wendy Chin-Tanner, "On Truth in a Nonmoral Sense," available online at http://vinylpoetry.com/.

[17] See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); see also Daniel T. O'Hara, The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche's Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009).

[18] On affective geography and poetry, see Heather H. Yeung's forthcoming Spatial Engagement with Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

[19] See my "Textual Geographies: The Real-and-Imagined Spaces of Literature, Criticism, and Theory," in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 14.3 (2014): http://reconstruction.eserver.org/.

[20] Ralph Ellison, "Harlem Is Nowhere" (1948), in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 295.

[21] See Chin-Tanner, "No Moon," in Turn (Alexander, Arkansas: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), 38.

[22] See my "Geocriticism in the Middle of Things: Place, Peripeteia, and the Prospects of Comparative Literature," in Clement Levy and Bertrand Westphal, eds., Geocritique: Etat des lieux / Geocriticism: A Survey (Limgoes: Pulim, 2014), 6-15.

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