Capitalist urban societies have been presented by popular media in two lights: The Utopia and the Dystopia. The Utopian city celebrates the diversity of its cultures, the organization of its cityscape and its economic structure, and the wealth and comfort of its space sets alight the infinite possibilities of humanity. The Dystopian city scrutinizes the hollowness of the individuals and the cultures, the entrapment of the diminishing space, conflicts and madness of its inhabitants, and the erosion of its humanity by the daunting cityscape.
Popular media in the last century have devoted much of their resources in depicting urban life, and have presented it in contrasting lights. Films, for example, ranged from the dark representation in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, to the violence in Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange or David Fincher's Fight Club, to the innocent expression of love in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, and the comical desperation for relationships in Woody Allen's Manhattan. This article, however, will focus on the Dystopian perspective of the Urban from another media text, that of Popular Fiction.
While cinema has captured and enraptured its audience with its visual representations, books have had a significantly longer relationship with the masses, and serve as perhaps the best documentation of history. Furthermore, books interpellate their audience through a textual narrative, rather than a visual one, which forces the reader to create a mental conception of the dystopian landscape, rather than interpret that which is created by filmmakers. This representation is far greater pronounced than that which is visual, as it encompasses the situation in context with the general narrative, the characters, and represents the totality of the landscape synchronized with the imagination and experiences of the reader, which creates an effect arguably superior to that of the experienced world. The choice of books and writers is critical for this analysis, and will focus on canonical writers, both western as well as non-western, who have provided the perspectives of Urban Dystopia prior to the age of the cinema.
Literature portraying the Dystopian city usually employs the perspective of the Flaneur, or Flaneuse, to represent the city. The Flanerie, be it set in Moscow, Paris, Beijing, or a fantastic city, is panoptic, stifling and hollow, with the flaneur, being supra-human, the only disengaged and conscious party in the materialistic masquerade. The Flaneur, as defined by Walter Benjamin (in Yue, 2003), is focused on the spectacle of life on the streets, in the arcades, and modernity is embalmed into the mind of the Flaneur at 4 kilometers per hour. At the turn of the 20th Century, the tortured Czech-German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1964) described the spectacle of life on the Parisian walkways as revolting, and lamented the impending death of Life despite the "lively" activity on the streets. Rilke opened his "The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Briggs" with this observation: "So then people do come here in order to live; I would have sooner thought one died here. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. [...] The street began to smell from all sides. A smell, so far as one could distinguish, of iodoform, of the grease of pommes frites, of fear. All cities smell in summer." Rilke's emphasis on the stench in his opening paragraph depicts his contempt of the cityscape encapsulated in its smells. The iodoform represents the sanitarized environment in which its inhabitants dwell in, while the grease and the french fries represents the working class lifestyle which he deemed culturally simplistic, and the fear as the primary motivation of the Parisians subjected to the daunting Le Corbusier wonderland they dwell in.
The panoptic environment of the Dystopian City is an issue which has been further developed by later writers, most notably Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. In “1984”, Orwell's society is urbanized, and centers around a "Big Brother" system of control over its inhabitants (Orwell, 2000). The subjects live in fear, and will gradually become soulless and hollow if they did not rebel. Huxley (1964) emphasized the theme of Hollowness in his “Brave New World”, and captures a vivid account of controlled minds and controlled lives. Control is a major urban issue, as urban societies are deemed to be the liberated, and thus free, but the inhabitants of urban spaces are controlled by the politics, economy, and geography of the environment. Space becomes scarce as cities develop, and the structures, both physical and metaphysical, become cells which imprison the inhabitants. Surveillance is everywhere, and as portrayed by Huxley and Orwell, the closest kin and friends are secret agents propagating the ethos of urban society, resulting in the conformity to Bourgeois, mass-produced cultures and lifestyles. Cultural jammers, therefore, are the rebels of the system, and are the ones who are deemed liberated.
The Dystopian city bears another hallmark which is often portrayed in popular fiction, that of a materialistic society. Emile Zola demonstrates his resentment with his many crafted short stories shedding light on Paris in the late 19th Century. In "The Thin and the Fat", Zola (2003) describes the scene of Paris at sunrise as the “preparations of the great daily orgy”, which “for a paltry copper the passers-by would purchase a glimpse and a whiff of springtide in the muddy streets”. The Materialistic landscape provides the opportunity for a Flaneur to scrutinize the inner sanctums of the city, and examine its decadence. Oscar Wilde's Flaneur, the protagonist in "The Picture of Dorian Gray", in his most lucid moments, observes the urban landscape of London as that of comprising “black-shadowed archways and evil looking houses” filled with “drunkards chattering to themselves like monstrous apes”, wild women, and “grotesque children huddling on doorsteps” (1994). Virginia Woolf (1996) highlights the materialistic Londoners as pretentious, and their behaviours, contrived. Her protagonist, Mrs Dalloway, paints a ridiculous picture of the vanity of the British middle class with their fur coats on an open top omnibus on a warm day. The contrived nature of the urban cities led to the formulation of Samuel Beckett's famous opening line in Murphy (1957), “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”, where the newness and the renewal of life in Dublin is far removed, leaving caricatures of half-insane inhabitants seeking a tragic-comic end to their inconsequential lives, which duly happens in the manner that the city deemed fit.
Fashionable Western cities such as Paris, Dublin or London are not the only setting of a Dystopian City. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Moscow, in “Notes from the Underground”, contains the inhabitants of the city mired in abject loneliness and hopelessness. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine, develops his fetish for the labyrinth in urban South America. His nightmarish vision of the city, portrayed in the allegorical “The Immortal”, led the Flaneur in the story to describe the city as “so horrible that its mere existence contaminates the past and the future and in some ways jeopardizes the stars”. Lu Xun’s Urban China is no different, and in his various short stories, he has portrayed Chinese cities as a farcical theatre of stupidity and injustice, which empties the souls of the common man.
Cultural representations of the Urban Dystopia have been heralded and presented to its audience for centuries, and recent media texts have heightened this awareness to a new degree. The efficacy of such portrayal is of interest to some, while others adopt a more resigned attitude towards these portrayals, while the majority is generally apathetic towards this Dystopia, preferring to remain as cogs in the urban machinery. Instead of celebrating or criticizing the Urban Dystopia, the inhabitants or the media texts’ representation, more fundamental issues need to be addressed by text writers before launching head-on into the production of such texts. Lu Xun offers a perspective, a dilemma perhaps, which would serve these writers well as they endeavour in their portrayal of urban life, a topic close to the hearts of many:
“Suppose there was an iron room with no windows or doors, a room it would be impossible to break out of. And suppose you had some people who were sound asleep. Before long, they would all suffocate. In other words, they would slip peacefully from a deep slumber into oblivion, spared the anguish of their impending doom. Now let’s say that you came along and stirred up a big racket that awakened the lighter sleepers. In that case, they would go to a certain death fully conscious of what was going to happen to them. Would you say you have done those people a favour?”
References
Beckett, S. (1957). Murphy. Grove Press: London.
Borges, J. (1998). Collected Fiction. Viking: New York.
Dostoyevsky, F. (1992). Notes from the Underground. Dover Publications: New York.
Huxley, A. (1964). Brave New World. Bantam: London.
Lu, X. (1990). Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of Hawaii Press:
Honolulu.
Orwell, G (2000). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin: London.
Rilke, R.M.(1964). The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Briggs. W.W. Norton & Company:
New York.
Wilde, O. (1994). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin: London.
Woolf, V. (1996). Mrs Dalloway. Wordsworth: London.
Yue, A. (2003) Shopping in Interpreting Everyday Culture. Martin, F.(ed.). pp.124-131.
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Zola, E. (2003). The Fat and the Thin/La Ventre de Paris. Lightning Source Inc: London.
