Return to Article Details Urban fictions of factual representation

“[T]he fictions of factual representation” is
the extent to which the discourse of the historian
and that of the imaginative writer overlap,
resemble, or correspond with each other.

(Hayden White)

I

The modern city is something more than a community of humans and social conveniences, it something more than a mere juxtaposition of institutions and administrative devices; the city is rather a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions (Park, Burgess and McKenzie 1). The urban settlement is not just an artificial construction or an object of architecture but it is “involved in the vital process of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature” (1). In this sense, as Oswald Spengler pointed out, the city has its own culture (qtd in Park, Burgess and McKenzie 1). Lewis Mumford also provides a well-workable definition for the modern city as a theatre for active citizenship, for education and autonomous personal life and the concentration of power in The City in History (429). However, the city as presented by visual narratives is more than the laboratory of the modern; it is overall a labyrinth of interpretations with the notion of the laboratory going back to Foucault’s allegory of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 204). This notion of the laboratory corresponds to the enclosed, separated space of the city and envisages surveillance by acting out its powerful function over the citizens that inhabit it. Thus, the modern city is more than a single image. As T. J. Clark observed, the city is connected to the capital "inscribed as a map in the city-dwellers" which "mass-produces an image of its own" (qtd. in Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity 59).

This paper is an attempt to read the American city from an alternative point of view by focusing on the question of what images can tell about it, what are the limits of representation and what is the implied methodology of historical consciousness in urban discourse. This type of discourse, with its ‘in-betweenness,’ is shifting from the conventional history of the city to interdisciplinary approaches and is becoming an essential part of contemporary cultural studies. The practitioners of the field of history, as Hayden White argues, become much more aware of the field’s linguistic nature and a work of art―whether a novel, a play, or even a movie―could only be understood, if analyzed in its historical context. These current developments raise the question of disciplinary boundaries of history, literature and visual arts, and claim a critical rethinking of their relationship in particular. Moreover, this rethinking has a strong influence on the interpretation of visual images within the field of humanities at large. To achieve these goals, my paper will follow a selection of films as referential points, namely Buried Child (dir. David Horn, 2016), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (dir. Richard Brooks, 1958), Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), The Crucible (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 1996), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Mike Nichols, 1966). By incorporating these American films into my argumentation, the paper aims to go beyond the temporal representation of the modern city and seeks to find a new understanding of historical imagination through cinematic representation. Films, as products of the dominant ideology in the era when they were released, bear directly or indirectly the imprints of historical consciousness. Therefore, I see filmmakers and especially film directors as historians, who are depicting the historical, aesthetic and artistic ‘aura’ of the era. The title of my inquiry refers to metahistorical thinking, that is, Hayden White’s term of “fictions of factual representation.” This paper is part of a current, larger research project and provides neither an in-depth analysis of the following films nor a temporal and historical representation of the American city as such but is just a mere an outline for an alternative conceptual framework concerning urban discourse. The detailed analysis of these films is the upcoming step of this research project which will be elaborated in subsequent papers.

Unconventional histories aim to abandon the truth claims of history originating in Leopold von Ranke’s doctrine of re/constructing what actually happened, in order to focus on the principles of authenticity. Thus, the main focus from the time-spaced language of historical texts can be shifted to the collective reading of the image-text relations that can represent the incomprehensible enigma of the so-called ‘past/ness.’ I use the artificial word ‘past/ness’ deliberately for emphasizing its difference from the academic field of history. Past/ness corresponds to the claim for histories instead of the history and refers to the Whitean ‘historical field’ (Szélpál 2006, 149). According to White, the ‘historical field’ exists out there and the historian deliberately chooses his facts from its elements in the process of creating a story from the chronicle. As a result, spectators of images are at the same time ‘readers’ of the visual narrative and create their own histories. This shift in vision can provide an alternative point of view that does not claim to be the history proper but one among the others. As Paul Virilio argues, spectators do not manufacture mental images on the basis of what they are given to see, but on the basis of their memories by “filling themselves the blanks and their minds with images created retrospectively” (110). In this sense, the key argumentation of this paper is first connected to the Whitean metahistorical interpretation adopted to the representation of the modern city, more precisely to how different images of the city conceptualize the problem of representation. According to White, a historical work is a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse and has a deep structural content which is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature that serves as a paradigm of what a historical explanation should be. This paradigm functions as a metahistorical element in all historical works (White 1990, ix). Secondly, I intend to highlight the ways in which cinematic representations provide and construct a new method of historical interpretation within the urban discourse by illustrating these always shifting, altering images encapsulated within the time-space compression (Harvey 1989, 1). In my opinion, filmic discourse with its peculiar tropes of time and space is one the most intriguing tools for representing past/ness. Consequently, the status of fictional and factual discourses within the urban studies will be my main objects of scrutiny.

II

The European City planning model was transplanted and displaced to the American terrain, as Leonardo Benevolo argues, but the colonial conditions reinterpreted its definition; thus, “the Cartesian grid became the standard sign of civilization” (Benevolo 122, 123). Due to the Land Ordinance of 1785, however, the American city planning broke away from the European tradition and the city became a capitalist enterprise with its transitory borders and land speculations. According to Lewis Mumford, this expansion of the country corresponds to the vertical and horizontal growth of the American city connected to the architectural innovations such as the skyscrapers, elevators and the gridiron pattern. Thus, the American city multiplied its own image and went beyond the notion of being a laboratory of colonizer Europe. Four distinct settlement types appeared at the end of the colonial period that characterized the American settlement tradition later on: the Southern plantation, the New England town, the collation of farms and the coastal city (Glaab and Brown 1-4). These images, as imprints of the collective historical imagination, reappear in filmic narratives released in the dominant political ideology of the subsequent historical periods. These factual representations are presented in narrative forms with ideological implications and have a deep structural level of historical imagination which functions as a metahistorical element in all historical artifacts. Historiography as a form of fiction-making is not surprising at all; if we take into consideration, as Hayden White argues, that before the French revolution historiography was considered part of literature. Therefore, the aim of the history writer was to make a verbal image of reality, thus to create or invent a story about the past events (White 1978, 122-123). As Macaulay argues “the fictions are so much like the facts, and the facts so much like the fictions,” that is history is more than a philosophy teaching by examples, and the “historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque” (72). And the “picturesque” is a key word concerning the alternative for what a visual image can offer to historiography connecting verbal images of historical facts with the visual images of the filmic discourse. I argue that in reconstructing American history or every kind of past/ness, in exploring the relationship between images and figurative language and in reconstructing how a culture develops a collective imagination, this key word is pivotal.

This type of reconstruction of the past is available to us in various narrative forms. Filmic discourse makes up a real world out of selected images and sounds, which construct a sense of illusion and through this illusion, the past can be made present. Filmic discourse can reveal the blind spots of representation, that is the gap between fictional and factual discourses, and make historical consciousness evident through experimenting with the laboratory of the “persistence of vision” (Sobchack 1996, 13-14). In this sense, the blind spot provides the key to the understanding of the plot and shows the inherent potentials of the visual medium within the field of American Studies (Cristian 2014). On the level of the city turned into an image, crucial transformations appeared in the metropolitan narrative. The process of transformation in this case can be described by the above-mentioned four stereotypical images of American settlement tradition; hence, the traces of these settlement prototypes can be found in the referential films I chose as examples for this paper. The image of the city has today a multimedia translatability through its rapidly changing notions of time and space. And as such, the self-representation of the city earns significance by transfiguring itself from the ‘narrated city’ to the ‘narrating city’ (Scherpe 75). The metaphors of legibility and “imageability” of the urban landscape are crucial elements in the analysis of the modern city. Kevin Lynch recounted these terms in his work, The Image of the City by focusing

especially on one particular visual quality: the apparent clarity or "legibility" of the cityscape. By this, we mean the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern. Just as this printed page, if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a relational pattern of recognizable symbols, so a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern. (2-3, emphasis added)

This leads to the definition of imageability, which is “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer” (Lynch 9). The shape, color, or forms facilitate and create mental images of the environment within the observers that can be called legibility or visibility, where objects are presented intensely to the senses by inviting the eye and ear to greater attention and even participation in the interpretation process (Lynch 9-10).

In this context, the city of Salem in The Crucible corresponds to the urban symbolism of the coastal port city; the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a representation of the Southern plantation home in the Mississippi Delta, New Carthage in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? corresponds to the urban image of the New England town, and the farm setting of Buried Child is placed in the circumstances of disenchantment with the American Dream, and represents the 1970s economic decline of American agriculture and farm life in relation to the urban tradition, and what is more, the collapse of traditional family structures and values in this very setting. Meanwhile, the setting of Citizen Kane is strikingly distinct from the four mentioned stereotypical images of the American settlement tradition because it is the re/production of Hollywood’s dream factory, a place of illusions within a real city. In Citizen Kane, the city is represented, in Elizabeth Grosz’s approach, as projected images and fantasies of bodies; the city becomes thus the place that recreates, controls and constructs bodies (48). The final scene of Citizen Kane with its image of the city built from cardboard boxes is a very suitable example for this image production. The metaphors of reading these filmic settings like ‘snapshots’ of modern social life is particularly appropriate in this case. Consequently, these images are signs that pretend not to be signs, as Mitchell argues, by “masquerading as (or, for the believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence” (1989, 529). These shifting images of the visual narratives are the product of both “immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience” (Lynch 4) that are used to interpret information and they overlap interrelatedly by giving sense of wholeness.

Consequently, Citizen Kane is one of the best example for representing the image production of the American City (Szélpál 2005 244-245). Here, the protagonist builds up an artificial city, like Kublai Khan his empire – which is in the United States, and all within the city of New York – in order to escape into his memories represented by those cardboard boxes. Charles Foster Kane’s personal history is narrated and documented unconventionally as a public history. The film itself is also a by-product of a feigned city, Hollywood, the dream factory of the cinematic city. This image production was accompanied with ideology-making through the medium of newspapers, radio broadcasting or film-making. The new language of visual images here redefines the concepts of Americanness and citizenship by opening up channels of communication across traditional cultural and state boundaries and bridging the gap between fictional and factual discourses. Hence, “the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies,” as Baudrillard argues, and grasping its meaning one “should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the city” (56) by giving frame to the image of the city as screenscape. The screenscapes of the ‘cinematic city’ explore the relations between the urban and cinematic space by contributing to a new way of encountering and interpreting history (Clarke 1).

This comprehension of the city goes beyond the conventional investigations of its geography, ecology, sociology or history by framing it as an urban discourse. According to Joachim Schlör, we can interpret and read metropolitan experiences that have been schematized as evidences of the modern experience (16-17). In this sense, the central figure of urban description and the symbol of modernity are the street and its public spaces. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, however, are referring to a paradigm shift in the analysis and understanding of cities. Since cities are the foundations of Western civilization, and the changed notions of time and space are the most visible in the urban developments and this new way of thinking is related to the “tele-mediated nature of urban life” (Graham and Marvin 48). Today, we live (also) in a digital culture and the world of imagery surrounds our everyday life and the new types of consumption such as advertising images, television and movie penetrate into society and the private lives. Thus, this process operates “in ways that can stretch our ability to perceive and understand cities, distance, space and time, the nature of what is public and what is private to breaking-point” (Graham and Marvin 49). Technological networks, such as television, Internet, cinema, create new virtual spaces, realities and times in all fields of urban life, which networks bind together different places in the form of ‘real time’ networks (Graham and Marvin 49). And this new sense of space-time is mediated by urbanism (Kern 240). comprehension of the city goes beyond the conventional investigations of its geography, ecology, sociology or history by framing it as an urban discourse. According to Joachim Schlör, we can interpret and read metropolitan experiences that have been thematized as pieces of evidence of the modern experience (Schlör 16-17). In this sense, the central figure of urban description and the symbol of modernity are the streets and its public spaces. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, however, are referring to a paradigm shift in the analysis and understanding of cities. Since cities are the foundations of Western civilization, and the changing notions of time and space are the most visible in the urban developments. This new way of thinking is connected to the "tele-mediated nature of urban life" (Graham and Marvin 48). We live in a visual culture and the world of imagery surrounds our everyday life. The new types of consumption such as advertising images, television, and movie penetrate into society and the private lives. Thus, this process operates "in ways that can stretch our ability to perceive and understand cities, distance, space and time, the nature of what is public and what is private to breaking-point" (Graham and Marvin 49). Technological networks, such as television, Internet, cinema, create new spaces and times in all fields of urban life, which networks bind together different places in the form of ‘real-time’ networks (Graham and Marvin 49). This new sense of space-time is mediated by urbanism (Kern 240).

Cities are becoming (in)visible to us by the virtual networks of computers, cables or radio that govern our way of life and manifest them as labyrinths of information. The city built on virtual network system constantly and persistently challenges our traditional categories. This does not mean the death or dissolution of the cities but a new conceptual analysis of the image of the city (Graham and Marvin 378). In this sense, the city is more like a theater, as Harvey argues, and more like “a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles” (1989, 5). The image of the city is rather like a labyrinth, “honeycombed with such diverse networks of social interaction” (5).

This paradigm shift in interpretation raises the question of representation and methodology, that is, how we response to the changed conditions of the city. This means that we are now confronted with the problem of reading, redefining and naming this new kind of city by persistently metaphorizing the urban experience (Sharpe and Wallock 1-2). Analyzing the cities from traditional points of view, like from the structural viewpoint that the city was a product of ‘the Age of Capital,’ (Sharpe and Wallock 3) seems to be anachronistic. To overcome this, Sharpe and Wallock propose three phases for the metaphors of the modern city which are the concentrated settlement, center city with suburban ring, and the decentered urban field creating “an urban civilization without cities” (11) The last statement implies the interpretation that this urban image is a city without boundaries or a network without material center. Each phase “poses a linguistic challenge,” that is each has different “metaphoric re-evaluation” (11) within its own narrative. his paradigm shift in interpretation raises the question of representation and methodology, that is, how we respond to the changed conditions of the city. This means that we are now confronted with the problem of reading and naming this new kind of city by metaphorizing the urban experience (Sharpe and Wallock 1-2). Analyzing the cities from traditional points of view, like from the structural viewpoint that the city was a product of ‘the Age of Capital,’ (Sharpe and Leonard Wallock 3) is anachronistic. Sharpe and Wallock propose three phases for the metaphors of the modern city which are the concentrated settlement, center city with a suburban ring, and the decentered urban field creating "an urban civilization without cities" (11). The last statement implies the interpretation that this urban image is a city without boundaries or a network without a material center. Each phase "poses a linguistic challenge," that is each has different "metaphoric re-evaluation" (11) within its own narrative.

Today’s city is both material and virtual. Sharpe and Wallock propose that the city is a system of signification, like language, “dependent on certain fixed relations” (15). In this sense, the ‘illegible’ city as a text or a narrative can be read with as many interpretations as it has readers within the limits of representation (16-17). As Marco Polo says in Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse,” (14) in “signs from language but not the one you think you know” (48).

III

One way of interpreting history is by representing historical shreds of evidence through images. In the interpretation of this process, Hayden White reverses Gombrich’s question about the relationship of historiography and art by inviting the question: What are the artistic components of historiography? The metahistory of the city, applying to Hayden White’s term (1990, ix-x) proposes a deep structural content in the representation of the city which is generally poetic and the rhetoric of this urban imagery serves as a code to comprehend historical consciousness. Therefore, the discourse of history is nothing but the allegorical representation of facts. What connects these cinematic texts and combines them into para-historical narratives is that historical consciousness in films offers an alternative solution, as Peter Burke argues, to the problem of turning images into words. In this sense, what White calls “historiophoty defined as the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and film discourse, is complementary to historiography” (160). Thus, the potential of film for making the past to be present is becoming apparent. This does not mean that we cannot make the distinction between fact and fiction but there is a gap between that we understand as fact and what we comprehend as fiction – in an always-shifting way. But how can we fill the gap between the fictional and factual discourses? According to White, some pivotal facts about the past can only be represented by visual images like for example landscapes, colors or the notion of space-time hat we comprehend as fiction in an always-shifting way. The question arises, however, how we can fill the gap between the fictional and factual discourses? According to White, some crucial facts about the past can only be represented by visual images like for example landscapes, colors or the notion of space-time (1988, 1193).

On the level of the city turned into an image, the power of cinematic representation is that it offers the spectator, as Peter Burke argues, a sense of witnessing the past. This is also the danger of the medium because this sense of witnessing is an illusory one within the always changing of here and now moment (159). So, the essential point is the act of interpretation with its ideological implications. Conventionalism is a doctrine, as White argues, which determines the interpretation of a historical text (1981, 151). According to White, convention alone which defines the value on behalf of which a given discipline “plays its game,” that is, convention functions as an authority that the given discipline appeals to distinguish its way of work from that of other disciplines. Capturing a bona fine meaning or interpretation of a historical text is a fallacy in itself. The historical explanation with its ideological implications can be described with the following parable of E.D. Hirsch about the blind men and the elephant: The blind man at the tail thinks the elephant is a snake, but the blind man at a leg thinks the elephant is a tree. Historical imagination functions on a distinct level than the sheer “judicious employment of the rules of evidence” (White 1986, 66-67). It is present in the figurative level of historical discourse that gives us a new comprehension of historical relativism. In this sense, the historian’s craft has an artistic component with the power of constructive imagination (White 1975, 67).

Alun Munslow goes beyond White’s metahistorical theory by deconstructing the canon of history with the argument that the meaning of a historical text is arbitrary and figuratively produced. This assumption is different from the traditions of historical constructionism or reconstructionism. The narrative paradigm of history functions as a counter-history on the basis of its detour from the Rankeian doctrine of depicting history as it actually happened – wie es eigentlich gewesen. Consequently, the subjective focalization of the narration can affect the concept of truth in history and made explicit that the historian as narrative-maker offers truth-value to the evidence. According to Munslow, this happens even if a historian believes in the access of the past reality as an empirical act of reconstructive surgery; the interpretation-as-history must remain ultimately a function of the nature of representation. Specifically, the historian’s narrative choices, textuality as well as their epistemic and cultural milieu. Therefore, as Munslow writes, in writing history the emphasis is not on the re/construction of the past based on empirical research process and the colligation of so-called real evidences but on the representation of past/ness. Moreover, he stresses, “the past is not discovered or found. It is created and represented by the historian as a text, which in turn is consumed by the reader” (Munslow 178).

Reading or interpreting the city through visual narratives offers an alternative solution for interpreting history. Yet, relatively little theoretical analysis has been dealt directly with grasping the relationship between urban and cinematic space, and its connections to the narrative paradigm of history. The traditions of analysis have shaped what historians defined as the modern city. The city in history is both “the form and symbol of integrated social relationship,” and “the maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community” (Mumford 1995, 21) Moreover, as Mumford argues, the mind takes form in the city, that is the city records culture and give space to time through the different layers of preservation. The city is more than a museum of historical artifacts since time becomes visible in the city. Each building and image of the city can tell a story by leaving an imprint upon minds of its citizens y leaving an imprint on minds (Mumford 1995, 22-23). The urban discourse with its interdisciplinary character has attempted to integrate this palimpsest of disciplinary investigations “where previous strata of cultural coding underlie the present surface and each waits to be uncovered and ‘read’ ” (Sharpe and Walllock 9).

In some aspects, reading the American city is exceptional. The contemporary perception of American cities corresponds to a vast or vanishing city figure reconstructed from fragments of films, television dramas, popular music, and advertising images. The city is collection different kinds of interpretations where people invest their own understanding and try to create their own histories. This type of internal urbanization process goes on with the role of acting, thinking and feeling of the process of urbanization, thus, it is a way of life (Wirth 1). In this sense, the city can echo to a text, as Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean assert, and can be constructed as a text like an ‘inscription of man in space’ (162). This premise attracts divergent layers of interpretations from the dominant historical readings to the interdisciplinary approaches.

Ewa Domanska defined unconventional history in her presentation on “Sincerity and Discourse about the Past” on an international conference titled as History and Theory of Historical Studies (2004) at the Central European University, Budapest. The following chart was inspired by her speech and intends to highlight the main characteristic features of academic history and the counter-histories that stand opposed to them:

  • Canon of history
  • Historical
  • Conventional academic history
  • RANKE
  • “wie es eigentlich gewesen“
  • Discipline
  • conventions
  • explanation
  • anachronism
  • linear time
  • truth, “search for truth”
  • synthesis
  • political history
  • re/construction of the past
  • empirical research process
  • language as the non-arbitrary mode of communication
  • perspective proper
  • the city as sub-topic
  • the modern city
  • the city as a theatre
  • English urban studies: Cities from structural point of view, German school: social, cultural and psychological consequences of life in the modern city (Max Weber, Oswald Spengler), Chicago school: physical structure and “moral order,” ecological approach, Robert Park
  • Counter-history
  • Ahistorical
  • Unconventional history
  • FOUCAULT
  • Metaphorical thinking
  • Cultural relativism
  • Discourse
  • (mis)representation of the past: visual narratives, historiographic metafictions, “eyewitnessing the past”
  • “time-space compression”
  • gaps, blind spots, fragments
  • authenticity
  • interdisciplinarity
  • Alternative histories: oral history, witness literature, etc.
  • deconstruction of the canon
  • history as narrative making
  • new understanding of historical imagination
  • alternative points of view, anamorphosis
  • urban discourse
  • discontinuous city
  • the city as labyrinth
  • new methodological approaches: “reading the city, the illegible”

The main tension between the academic field of history and unconventional histories is that the academic history is still a very positivist discipline in searching for the truth of the Rankeian ‘what actually happened.’ Historians, due to the limited capacity of languages are not able to fully write the truth about the past even if they try to endow their sources with absolute meaning. However, unconventional histories can be traced back to Foucault’s discourse theory. In this sense, truth is defined by power relations and by creating a context in which something gets the label or meaning of being true. Discourse formation in the Foucauldian sense gives the opportunity for historical studies to (re)invent their object of studies and to renew it by transgressing the disciplinary borders. This assumption implies that it is no longer adequate to think in terms of old-fashioned paradigms that succeed one another, but to recognize the methodological pluralism and the palimpsest-feature that characterize the co-existence of alternative histories today.

IV

The aim of this paper is to draw the attention to the alternative ways of interpreting urban discourse as unconventional histories within the field of American Studies. The organizing principle of my argumentation is the claim that these unconventional histories as interdisciplinary approaches belong to a “Land of Paradise Lost.” This is the place where reconsideration of historical paradigms and/or the deconstruction of historical canon can take place by creating a dialogue between conventional and unconventional histories. In this regard, film discourse is more than a mere complement to urban historiography. Historical consciousness, according to Vivian Sobchack, is constituted from both showing and saying. Thus, histories of the cinema co-exist, complete and cooperate with academic histories in an always-shifting way (Sobchack 1997, 1). The challenge of interpreting films as historical artifacts reveals the need for analyzing the language of images by going beyond the convention of searching for the truth in the past/ness. And to achieve this, metahistorical thinking may liberate us from the vicious circle of anachronisms by asking new questions and opening up new perspectives not only in terms of history but also in the vast terrain of the humanities as well.

 

Works Cited

 

Films Cited

Copyright (c) 2018 Lívia Szélpál

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