Abstract
I suggested towards the conclusion of Chapter 2 that the word ‘representation’ should hereafter be placed under erasure, at least when used in relation to the city text and the writing of the urban space, given that certain city texts in their appreciation of alterity and aporia signal the exhaustion of the idea of representation, conventionally understood. What the first two chapters make manifestly apparent about the identity of London in nineteenth-century writing is that the city’s representation is always unstable. We take this as something of a critical truism, but it is important nonetheless to understand — or try to comprehend — the instability in all its newness, as it first came to be contemplated. Our critical understanding of the history of the city’s representations is founded on a certain ‘stability’ of the city’s unstable identity; instability itself becomes a familiar and recognizable simulation of the city itself. The premise of writing the city, of writing about the city as modern, and accommodating one’s discourse to that act of inscription involves a recognition and acknowledgement of the destabilizing nature of what one is caught up in describing. Criticism can only follow in the wake of acts of writing which are themselves marked by the signs of destabilization.
There emerges from here a radical shift in our understanding and interpretation. … These can no longer be associated with a stable epistemological point of view depending upon the presumptions of a transcendental, unique and homogeneous truth …
Iain Chambers
Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big city crowd aroused in those who first observed it.
Walter Benjamin
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Notes
Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 75.
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 3.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Anxiety’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 1, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 440–60. The earlier work referred to is the paper entitled ‘On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description “Anxiety Neurosis”’, and is to be found in Volume 10, On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 35–63, which volume also contains ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ (1926; pp. 237–334) to which I will be referring below.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 2, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 113–44. Referred to in footnotes as AIL, followed by page number.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 186.
Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 182. Comparing l. 540 with ll. 158–60 of Book VII of The Prelude, Langan makes the point that the poem registers a ‘catalogue of London recreations, whose discursive form … mirrors the practice of urban walking’ (p. 182).
See, for example, Mary Ann Caws, ed., City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film (Langhorne: Gordon and Breach, 1993);
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, eds, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). The importance of vision and visual figures and tropes in relation to concepts of modernity in the nineteenth century is explored by Jonathan Crary in his influential Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, p. 285. See also, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘The City: the Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch’, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 125–48.
Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso, ed. Michael Speaks (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 83.
Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 10.
Chambers is here quoting De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. xxi. In this chapter, ‘Migrant Landscapes’, Chambers goes on to say that ‘Writing depends on the support of the “I”. … Yet in the provisional character or writing this structure oscillates’ (p. 10). Here he is describing how the very act of writing is a form of travel which, in its act, deconstructs the premise of stability and unity. For me, the act of writing the city in the nineteenth century is one provisional, yet highly visible, starting point for the act of identity’s self-deconstruction.
Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 208.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 20.
John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 2.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977), p. 4.
Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 121. See also pp. 119–25, which is particularly suggestive for a reading of De Quincey.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) trans. Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky, revised Engels (1887), ed. and introd. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 36.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1966).
Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 40.
Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, introd. Lucio Coletti (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 421. Marx wrote this in 1845, the same year that Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, preface Michel Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). See in particular Pt. 3, Ch. 10, ‘Capitalist Representation’, pp. 240–62.
William Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, in Poetical Works (1904), new edn rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 204.
Philip Cox, ‘William Wordsworth: Constructions of the “self” in The Prelude’, in Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996; pp. 58–80), p. 58. On the relationship between gender and genre, see Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Ch. 7: ‘Genre, Gender, and Autobiography’, pp. 187–205.
Alan Liu, ‘“shapeless Eagerness”: The Genre of Revolution in Books 9–10 of The Prelude’, Modern Language Quarterly, 43.1 (1982: 3–28), p. 6. Again, see Jacobus, Ch. 7, cited in n. 30. The confusion of genres that marks The Prelude (discussed by Cox, Gender, pp. 58–80), confusing the autobiographical with the epic, dislocates the very possibility of a single identity, whether personal or literary.
Antony Easthope, Wordsworth Now and Then: Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 27.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (1964) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 239.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy (1972) trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; pp. 1–29), p. 21.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference (1967) trans. Alan Bass (London: RKP, 1981, pp. 278–95), p. 286.
Forest Pyle, The Ideology of the Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 60.
Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 190. All further reference to this book is taken from the same passage as the first quotation.
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977) trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 33. Agamben is writing here of Freud’s theory of fetishes. A more sustained, fully psychoanalytic reading of Book VII might give attention to the city as fetish.
Porter, London, Chs. 8–12, pp. 185–305. A quarter of Porter’s book is given over to the history of Victorian London, which is a sign perhaps that, despite its longer history, London is, principally, a Victorian city, and the nineteenth century serves to define the city as much as the city defines Victorian life in all its complexity. Porter’s is an astute and comprehensive social history, and merits careful consideration. If I have not referred to it further, this is only because my prime concern is not with ‘history’ or ‘reality’ as such, but with rhetoric and the architecture of nineteenth-century writing about the city, as I have already discussed in my ‘Introduction’. Another fascinating study of London is David Kynaston’s The City of London: Volume I, A World of its Own 1815–1890 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), which provides a history of the rise of the City as the key financial centre of the world in the Victorian period.
Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1978) trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 110.
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© 1998 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (1998). Citephobia • the Anxiety of representation or, fear and loathing in London: Thomas De Quincey, Friedrich Engels, and William Wordsworth. In: writing London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372177_4
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