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