Literary City Limits: Cognitive Mapping in Contemporary Marseille Open Access

Abstract

In late 2015, news emerged of a significant development in the French television production landscape – that shooting was underway in Marseille for Marseille, the first French Netflix series. Featuring a stellar cast led by the totemic Gérard Depardieu in the role of an aging mayor of the city locked in a battle for political survival with his former protégé (Benoît Magimel), the project was presented by the Netflix representative for the series as one of potentially paradigmatic significance for that corporation and its transformative, global model. ‘Nous comptons faire plus de séries à l’étranger, et Marseille sera un test, car c’est notre première production européenne qui ne soit pas en anglais. Si elle marche, nous en ferons d’autres’ [We expect to make more series abroad, and Marseille will serve as a test because it is our first European production that is not in English. If it works, we will do others].¹Marseille, it appeared, was set to become the televisual transition point from a national scale and mode of production and distribution, understood both spatially and linguistically. The expanded creative possibilities of the multi-season series as the great new popular narrative form announced a radically transformed operating reality for producers of increasingly platform-based and streamed content. On the horizon: synchronous global audiences engaged in new, algorithmically driven consumption patterns and thus the possibility of exponentially greater cultural and economic impacts and returns for individual works.

In the event, Marseille’s suggestive structural positioning was not accompanied by success as an individual proposition. By early May 2016, with the first series live on the platform, an initial critical view was also ready to launch in the legacy discursive field (i.e. the relevant columns of the largely Paris-based national print media).² With the entertaining verve appropriate to the genre of the hatchet job, Télérama was representatively – and symptomatically – unkind:

Dire qu’on attendait Marseille est un euphémisme. […] Le résultat, loin d’être la claque espérée, très loin d’annoncer une révolution du PAF [paysage audiovisuel français], est plus qu’une déception. C’est une débandade artistique, un raté industriel pour Netflix, sans doute son premier navet ‘maison’, qu’on découvre d’abord surpris, puis consterné, enfin hilare face à la pauvreté de son scénario, l’indigence de ses dialogues, la lourdeur de sa mise en scène et la faiblesse de son interprétation. […] Débordant de trahisons, de complots, de secrets, de crimes passés, de coucheries et d’amours impossibles, Marseille n’est pas une tragédie politique. C’est un soap sur fond de politique, qui alterne scènes familiales à peine dignes d’un spin-off de Plus belle la vie et prises de bec plus ou moins politiques et dramatiques voulues tendues, intenses, sombres et sexuelles, mais qui dégringolent la Canebière tête la première et finissent au fond du Vieux-Port.³

[To say that Marseille was highly anticipated would be an understatement. […] The result, far from the hoped-for shake-up, very far from announcing a revolution of the French audio-visual landscape, is a disappointment and then some. It’s an artistic collapse, an industrial misfire for Netflix, probably its first ‘in-house’ turkey, which viewers will discover with surprise at first, then consternation and finally hilarity at the threadbare scenario, the lame dialogue, the heavy-handedness of the direction and the weakness of the acting. […] Overflowing with betrayals, conspiracies, secrets, casual sex and impossible loves, Marseille is not a political tragedy. It’s a soap with a political backdrop, alternating scenes of family life barely worthy of a spin-off of [the Marseille-set] Plus belle la vie with quarrels in a more or less political and dramatic vein, intended to be tense, intense, dark and sexual, but which tumble head-first down the Canebière and end up on the seabed in the Vieux-Port.]

Cancelled in 2018 after a second series, Marseille is arguably most interesting – as regards the relations of city and cultural production – in what it suggests about the supposed ability of its namesake to function in a manner akin to a brand. The project mobilizes a range of imaginary properties (not without internal tensions) in the speculative move from the French ‘audio-visual landscape’ towards the more or less infinite perspectives of the global streaming market. The city itself – become titular – moves beyond the status of a setting (indeed, critical accounts remarked upon the poverty of the series’ actual uptake of the visual possibilities and realities of the city – other than the drone-enabled panorama)⁴ to become a mythological sign in the Barthesian sense.⁵ This mythological offering is, however, directed beyond the ideological community in which the mythological account had its original consistency (i.e. the national audience), and is hence almost bound to fail (as disappointing, and ultimately hilarious, caricature) in the eyes of that community.⁶

Critical disdain notwithstanding, the Marseille case illustrates the constantly evolving configurations of possibility in the relations between artistic forms, practices and infrastructures. It reminds us of the parallel hierarchies of contemporary cultural production, in which formerly disdained and marginal pursuits may come to occupy dominant positions in the cultural landscape, with the corresponding dividends in symbolic and other capital that may follow. Marseille’s focal role in the development of French-language hip-hop and rap music from the mid-1980s onwards is another example of the city’s receptivity to the fluidity and possibility of the contemporary moment. It exemplifies the city’s ability to function as a cultural terroir, a specific set of conditions generating new and challenging work that interpellates a wider audience while remaining strongly rooted in and energized by a markedly localized vécu, or set of lived experiences.⁷

Indeed, where the Marseille case can be argued to have sustained and illustrated the mythological function is in offering new evidence of the long-standing, paradoxical ability of the eponymous city to inhabit a space of exemplarity precisely because of its robust singularity within the political, cultural and spatial imaginary of the national scene. Descriptors of this singularity would include Marseille’s historical status as gateway to and from the French Empire and the legacies of this status; its related embodiment of urbanity as culturally, socially and linguistically diverse; the city’s apparent imperviousness to external injunctions around improvement, standardization, modernization or conformity to a characteristically ‘French’, technocratic republican roadmap; the intensified localism of a city characterized by transitional and integrative processes; the sense of a metropolis in archipelagic relation (Braudel) with the Mediterranean and the South and bound to other geographical, economic and cultural logics than those of France alone.⁸ There is, furthermore, the idea that this complex, embedded difference is key to an understanding of the gap, more generally, between the conventional self-imaginings of the French political and cultural order and the changing realities of French life: between, in terms associated with Michel Houellebecq, the carte [map] and the territoire [territory].⁹ Marseille’s is not the generic exemplarity of a ‘literary second city’ in the development given to that formulation by Jason Finch, Lieven Ameel and Markku Salamela,¹⁰ but the somehow anomalous authority of the oldest of cities on the territory of the République Française to both showcase and deconstruct national versions of the ‘urban question’ – that is, the bouquet of issues and concerns that come together in the discussion of the ‘urban’ in the public discourses of the Hexagone.

Spaces of literary possibility

In the case of such ascendant forms as hip-hop and rap music and the streamed television series, the question of ‘possibility’ discloses a horizon of plenty. Though there may be a proliferation of offerings, both potential and realized, there is also an unprecedented scale of potential impact for work which ‘succeeds’ in the cultural marketplace of the neoliberal digital order. Somewhat conversely, as Mark McGurl has recently outlined in relation to the American literary scene, the contemporary proliferation of offerings in the sphere of literary creation has been accompanied by radically diminishing returns (symbolic and other) for the vast majority of producers, along with a tendency to reinforced generic compartmentalization of offerings subjected to the logic of the algorithm.¹¹ This distributional level and its logic is a supplementary but nonetheless crucial espace des possibles [space of possibility] which has emerged in the time since Pierre Bourdieu used that term in his Règles de l’art [The Rules of Art] to designate the nineteenth-century French writer’s internalized representation of the available room for creative manoeuvre within the literary field:

C’est une seule et même chose que d’entrer dans un champ de production culturelle, en acquittant un droit d’entrée qui consiste essentiellement dans l’acquisition d’un code spécifique de conduite et d’expression, et de découvrir l’univers fini des libertés sous contraintes et des potentialités objectives qu’il propose, problèmes à résoudre, possibilités stylistiques ou thématiques à exploiter, contradictions à dépasser, voire ruptures révolutionnaires à opérer.¹²

[It is one and the same thing to enter into a field of cultural production by paying an entry fee consisting essentially in the acquisition of a specific code of conduct and expression, and to discover the finite universe of freedoms subject to constraint and of objective potentialities it offers, problems to be resolved, stylistic or thematic possibilities to be fructified, contradictions to overcome or revolutionary breaks to bring about.]

The espace des possibles of the author is, here, the set of understood limits on literary expression for it to be receivable within the field. Literary possibility becomes a social question, related to what has been done before, and to what is being done – and its spatiality is primarily virtual, understood as a practice of positioning within and beyond established positions and configurations of practice. When the literature in question is also a literature of or related to (urban) place, an interesting additional layer accrues to the notion of the espace des possibles. Here, it is useful to turn to Louis Marin’s discussion of ‘Le portrait de la ville dans ses utopiques’ [‘The City’s Portrait in its Utopics’], Chapter 10 of the volume from which the title of the present special issue is derived, which argues for an important distinction between representations of urban spaces in the ‘zero world’ (or ‘geohistorical world of reference’)¹³ and those involved in the utopian Ur-text:

La transposition de l’espace habité par la ville dans le plan qui vise à le donner à voir et à lire n’effectue-t-elle pas l’opération contraire de celle que l’Utopie avait tentée avec l’île et la cité? N’inverse-t-elle pas le passage de l’histoire à sa figure schématique, monogrammatique, dans l’espace de jeu de la fiction, dans le texte? […] Ne peut-on reconnaître dans la carte figurative, dans le plan représentatif, le texte producteur d’un récit potentiel, le monogramme d’un récit possible de l’histoire, le condensé des codes dans lesquels il s’énonce? […] [Ces mouvements] se croisent en un point qui est le lieu privilégié de notre recherche critique, lieu d’interférences entre systèmes des signes et systèmes des images, entre représentation et discours, icône et lettre, espace et texte, point utopique.

Voilà pourquoi peut-être villes imaginaires, cités idéales, utopies sont, d’emblée, dans leur discours, des plans possibles dans lesquels l’espace joue pour produire un texte. Voilà pourquoi aussi les plans des cités réelles sont, d’emblée, dans leurs figures, des discours possibles par lesquels se construit un texte pour produire un espace: texte, espace qui sont, dans l’un et l’autre cas, le lieu où s’amorce le difficile déchiffrement de l’histoire.

[Transposing the inhabited space of a city into a map aims at revealing its details and intricacies. We see it and read it, but isn’t this operation the opposite of what we witness for Utopia’s island and city? Doesn’t it reverse the movement from history to its schematic and monogrammatic figure in the fictional space of play, and also in the text? […] I claim to find within the figurative and representative map texts that will produce potential narratives; they will contain in condensed versions the monograms of potential historical narratives and the codes from which they are enunciated. […] [These movements] intersect at a privileged point of our critical research; a place of interference between systems of signs and of images, between representations and discourse, icon and letter, space and text. This is the utopic point.

This is perhaps why, in their own discourses, imaginary cities and ideal places like utopias are automatically proposed as possible maps in which there is a play of space to produce a text. This may also be why in their figures maps of real cities are automatically presented as possible discourses out of which a text can be constructed to produce a space; here we have text and space in both cases, where the difficult decoding of history takes place.]¹⁴

The city map, the panoramic figuration of an extensive urban real, appears in this account to offer a spatial-textual basis for a critical act: the ‘difficult decoding of history’. Possibility here appears to subsist largely in the prospect of this critical endeavour – a rendering legible of ‘history’ within the elaboration of a discourse on and of the city. The critical effort for Marin involves reader and writer in a primary focus on the extensive, collective space represented by the (city) map – but maintains the text, ‘the fictional space of play’, as the countervailing space of possibility that participates in the prospect of a critical understanding of ‘history’. But what happens if we deploy Marin and Bourdieu’s respective spatializations of possibility in the approach of a single work? This appears a necessary question in the case of writers taking the given city as their explicit object, but for whom literary practice in the contemporary period represents a kind of critical promise within a broader prospect of (symbolic) dispossession or dissolution. The evolving theoretical metaphor of cognitive mapping may offer some assistance in this question, as it accommodates and acknowledges extensive and internal, spatial and subjective dimensions of the literary signifying process within a single paradigm – albeit of variable parameters.

As Liam Lanigan has recently argued, the multiplicity of aspects of the literary process in which ideas and discourses of mapping in general can be operative does not invalidate it as a focus of reflection for literary urban studies. Developing this point, he remarks that, ‘[f]or instance, the term “cognitive mapping” encompasses the narrativization of space, readers’ responses to the representation of space, the creation of mental maps of literary spaces, and the articulation of the social, political, and economic conditions that inform our relationship with space’.¹⁵ The last of these aspects correlates roughly with what is arguably the most widely influential engagement with the term – that of Fredric Jameson, typically traced back to a 1988 article and to further remarks in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,¹⁶ where its function is close to that of the Althusserian account of ideology as the imaginary representation by subjects of their real conditions of existence.¹⁷ Jameson diagnoses an inability of the contemporary subject to achieve satisfactory representation of the structural co-ordinates within which that subject has their lived experience, and which is foundational to a failure of critique characteristic of the ‘postmodern’ condition. Engaging with this version of cognitive mapping, Eric Prieto has commented on how the unrepresented and structural conditions in question are, for Jameson, of an essentially socio-economic order, and goes on to question whether this type of condition exhausts the set of structuring realities to which a consideration of cognitive mapping in literature can give access. Observing different orders of structuring reality at work in different kinds of text, Prieto proposes rethinking cognitive mapping in terms of what he calls ‘vertical integration’, with a view to a more developed account of place across a diversity of texts and authors:

What are the various levels of place, and how can they be brought together in support of a holistic theory of place? This question of vertical integration provides a somewhat more nuanced way to address the question of cognitive mapping raised by Jameson.

I would suggest that any holistic theory of place must be able to account for at least three layers of place – phenomenological, social and natural/material – and to be able to show how they fit together.¹⁸

Prieto goes on to point out how such ‘layers’ relate variably to consciousness – ‘vertical integration’ would thus permit the linkage within the one theoretical construct of ‘the inside of consciousness, the middle ground of social existence, and the apparently inhuman outside of the material world and natural environment’.¹⁹ The preoccupation is with a poetics of place, and Prieto’s rejoinder to Jameson is of value as a deepening of the spatial problem inherent in any recourse to the theoretical metaphor of cognitive mapping as a necessarily spatial proposition. Recalling Lanigan’s observation about the multiplicity of the cognitive mapping complex within literary urban studies, I would like, however, to propose an alternative integrative axis for the term as a way into the readings to be developed in the second part of this article. Implicit in the qualification cognitive is the subject of cognition. An alternative form of integration would focus on the modes of subjective experience of the given textualized space or place: how, we could ask, does the critical process of cognitive mapping function differentially across diverse forms of relation to the ‘zero-world’ of the urban proposition? This is in the first instance a question of the subject and its modes of relation and expression – but also begs that of the given urban space and the resources it offers, in its singularity, to the affectively embedded consciousness that seeks expression in relation with it.

Utopia and melancholy

Focusing specifically on the relations between melancholy and the utopia, Vita Fortunati has recognized the significance of the affective dimension for the apparently rational constructions of the classical utopian genre. Fortunati moves from a ‘working hypothesis […] revealing a paradox: the works conceived in line with the principles of reason are often provoked by an emotional drive or response’.²⁰ One effect this linkage has is to place in question the various constructions of ‘utopian’ space as in any way reliably readable in relation to historical, indexical spaces. Such questioning leads in turn to an understanding of utopian spatiality as a form of resistance (conscious or unconscious) to historical time:

Utopian historians have always identified two precise trends in utopia: on the one hand, an Arcadian trend of regression, whose centre is nature and the countryside; on the other hand, a technological and progressive trend developing on urban planning. [As regards] the intimate relationship between utopia and melancholy, both trends can be explained as strategies for escaping the problem of time, the real obsession of the utopian thinker, because in each and every one, at least until the 19^th century, the dialectic of time and history is cancelled.²¹

Emmanuel Loi’s Marseille amor offers an opportunity to explore the interworkings of utopia and melancholy in the present context.²² Loi’s generically diverse and challenging body of work has incorporated Marseille as an important recurring focus from the late 1980s, and notable earlier examples of his tendency to approach the city and its challenges frontally include the 1989 political essay Defferre et Marseille [Defferre and Marseille] and the resolutely noir 2005 municipal polar Marseille Médée [Marseille Medea].²³ These works belong to two major generic subdivisions in the contemporary literature of Marseille – the politico-sociological diagnostic text, and the variously critical or exploitative noir entertainment²⁴ – and testify in each instance to Loi’s unreconciled and somewhat tortured desire to understand and articulate the city’s (dys/)functioning. A second major strand of Loi’s work is the less classifiable material published about his own lived experience, in particular his experience of prison – giving rise to work such as L’Ordinaire [The Ordinary] (2000), published by Al Dante, a house most readily associated with practices of (anti-)poetic experimental writing. Marseille amor marks a kind of conjunction of these two modes, integrating a wide-ranging meditation on the city at ground level with a form of auto-analysis in the aftermath of the death of the author-narrator’s mother. Framed by this personal circumstance, the city as totality (designated by the proper name) emerges as a compellingly absent object. The author’s attempts to articulate a relation to it come to read as a struggle with formlessness that transcends the division of space between inner and outer worlds. This transcendence may be read in the recurrence of a symptomatic adjective at a few pages’ distance in the following remarks, whereby space and affect merge verbally:

Chaque habitant de Marseille entretient une certaine ambivalence à l’égard de sa ville, partagé entre un attachement indéfectible, tentaculaire,²⁵ et un rejet proche de la nausée.

[…]

Marseille est tentaculaire, ne sait pas où elle finit; par des nappes de ruelles, d’impasses fleuries, on arrive à des croisements qui renvoient à un autre carrefour, une subdivision de chances et de tristesses. Elle conserve des habitacles cassés reconstruits, des verrières éclatées; cabanons encombrés, garages bourrés d’outils non utilisés. S’y perdre – est-ce moins dur qu’ailleurs? – trouve une espèce de consolation dans des scénarios bricolés plus ou moins propices à restituer la pérégrination ou l’égarement. (MA, 40–41; 47–48, emphasis added)

[Each inhabitant of Marseille lives with a certain kind of ambivalence towards their city, divided between an unbreakable, tentacular attachment, and a rejection close to nausea.

[…]

Marseille is tentacular, doesn’t know its own limits; through layers of small streets and cul-de-sacs in bloom one arrives at intersections which lead to another junction, a subdivision of fortunes and afflictions. It preserves broken and rebuilt living spaces, smashed glass roofs and walls, cluttered cottages, garages chock-full with unused tools. To get lost in this – is it any less difficult than elsewhere? – is to find a kind of consolation in scenarios cobbled together, of varying ability to simulate peregrination or straying.]

The second extract quoted here outlines powerfully a theme which becomes central for the author-narrator upon having been recruited as an enquêteur [fieldwork interviewer] for a project in relation to the EuroMéditerranée urban renewal programme: that of the city’s formal elusiveness, its resistance to definition.²⁶ This circumstance offers the author-narrator the opportunity to inhabit from the inside (yet with a dissident perspective) a key problem for Marseille – its attractiveness to speculative urbanistic discourse and an ex machina reformist gaze. From the outset, the elusiveness of the actual city frays against this speculative, discourse-based tendency. Indeed, that elusiveness is central to its career as an object of rational designs. This structure is mirrored on a more intimate level, where the city as absent object is experienced, increasingly, as a question put to the subject on the nature of his own practice. The blurred contours of the urban space mirror those of the form-resistant written work. Loi’s engagements with built space reveal themselves thus to be paradoxically consonant with the resilience of the individual subject’s practice of writing as open process. Both arguably tend towards the utopian in their trenchant inconclusiveness.²⁷Marseille amor thereby allows for a framing of the question of the contemporary city as it appears to the resistant and embattled individual consciousness. Struggling with the weight of its own emergence, it becomes a text on the author’s inability to conduct the project of writing about the city in a way that escapes the affective gravitation of the writing subject and his inner state. ‘Le bord de la ville m’attire, l’endroit indéfinissable où elle se perd’ (MA, 95) [the edge of the city attracts me, the undefinable place where it disappears [literally: loses itself]], notes the author-narrator – imparting a suggestion of intimate collapse to the apparent problematics of urban sprawl and design.

Part of the complexity facilitated by the fragmented, notational form of Marseille amor is the self-lacerating inclusion of numerous critical rejoinders by various interlocutors to the author-narrator, which become almost therapeutic firebreaks within the notes themselves (MA, 119; 158–59, for example). This inclusion of other voices is not quite the utopian polyphony of a city become text. The writing subject never ceases to occupy a front line of preoccupation, caught up in the infernal process of managing its own critical energies and ressentiment [resentment] in a legible way, as an engagement with the city. As the text acknowledges, however, this is far from being a recent trait of the relations of the author-narrator with his adoptive home city. Among the recurrent echoes of the figures and problematics of the poetic tradition, we read of Le Spleen de Marseille [Marseille Spleen], an invocation of the figure and urban poetics of Baudelaire, a short film made by the author-narrator in the early 1990s.²⁸ Focusing on the Rue de la République, its limited critical reception anticipates that of the narrator’s ongoing work for the EuroMéditerranée commission. Thus, an ami plasticien [artist friend] goes on the offensive after a festival screening: ‘J’attendais autre chose qu’un fatras de traits acerbes […]. Se morfondre – car c’est ce que tu fais –, n’est-ce pas se congratuler, nourri du pire?’ (MA, 123) [I was expecting something other than a pile of bitter jibes […]. Moping around – because that’s what you’re doing – is that not just self-congratulation, feeding off the worst?].

The search for the limit at which the city breaks down is open to a reading, then, as the spatialization of a cognitive tension whereby the subject seeks both to develop and to resist his own critical speculative tendencies in the literary utterance. Critical consciousness leads to an impasse of creative and expressive action, for which the image of l’errance – an aimless covering of ground by the walker, stripped of the observational and epiphanic associations of Baudelairean flânerie – becomes a lived metaphor. ‘La spécificité de Marseille est de supporter les errances, de les collecter’ (MA, 138) [Specific to Marseille is its ability to put up with aimless wanderings, to collect them]. Here again, in this claim to specificity, the implicit other is the capital city that gave rise to the flâneur figure so central to theorizations of the modern urban subject:

Je ne sais pas pourquoi je persiste à dévorer des kilomètres à pied dans une ville si peu propice la flânerie. […] Cercles de plus en plus longs de marche éperdue, au cœur d’une ville qui serait une courtisane blasée. […] Marseille ne laisse pas tranquille, elle joue de sa gouaille. […] Il y a beaucoup d’autres marcheurs, tout aussi opiniâtres et désorientés. Le spectacle des passants, la cohorte de marcheurs et de badauds ne donnent pas forcément prise à un récit, à un rendu. Et l’ensemble des saynètes croquées sur le vif peut aussi bien être rangé dans un tiroir où dorment les avis de non-imposition. (MA, 143–44, emphasis added)

[I don’t know why I keep on relentlessly walking kilometre after kilometre in a city so unconducive to flânerie. […] Ever-greater circles of distraught walking, in the heart of a city that’s like an indifferent courtesan. […] Marseille will not leave you be, she works her cocky wit. […] There are many other walkers, all equally dogged and disoriented. The spectacle of the passers-by, the troop of walkers and onlookers, does not necessarily give rise to a narrative, to a return. And the set of little plays done on the wing can just as easily be put in a drawer where the confirmation of non-taxable status letters sleep.]

The compulsive quality of errance is key to a reading of Marseille amor (a title containing connotations of both love and death) as an auto-analytic treatment of the interferences between critical and creative relations with the city, and hence as a hybrid urbanistic shadow-autobiography. These qualities cohere and regain focus when the specifically utopian problematic within Marseille’s urbanism comes to the fore. Marseille, Loi acknowledges, has no shortage of both urbanistic and individual architectural projects explicitly foregrounding the desire for and possibility of an ‘avenir radieux’ [radiant future] – but these fall foul either of his critical-cynical eye, of the unpropitious terrain of the city, or both. Hence ‘[s]ortent de terre des mausolées fantoches de la nouvelle mer Morte qu’est Mare Nostrum: MuCEM, Regards de Provence et Villa Méditerranée’ (MA, 159) [puppet mausoleums of the new Dead Sea that is Mare Nostrum rise out of the ground: MuCEM, Regards de Provence and Villa Méditerranée] – whereby the city allegedly regresses into a fantasy of its Mediterranean history mistaken for a possible future. Meanwhile overtly utopian projects such as Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse – to be revisited below – come up short in the face of a local resistance: ‘La Maison du fada a été dénoncée dès la première tranche livré boulevard Michelet. “Un bagne de coco”, “l’œuvre d’un cinglé”, “le kholkoze d’un agent de l’Est”’ (MA, 236) [The ‘crackpot’s house' was denounced as soon as the first phase went up on the Boulevard Michelet. ‘A commie prison’, ‘the work of a nutjob’, ‘the kolkhoz of an Eastern Bloc agent’].

The affective heart of the architectural question is particularly on show in the concluding pages of Loi’s text, where the author-narrator invokes two other major figures of the architectural and social history of the city, Pierre Puget and Fernand Pouillon. Both were architects forced to practice elsewhere, having, in Loi’s account, given glimpses to the city of a transformative material and social vision. Remarking ironically on the ‘eloquence’ of the fact that Puget’s Vieille Charité ‘dédié aux indigents et aux sans-logis de l’époque abrite maintenant les musées de Marseille’ [[the place] dedicated to the poor and homeless of the time now houses the municipal museums], the author-narrator is more expansive about the figure of Poullion, who is chiefly associated with the reconstruction of the Vieux-Port after World War II and gives rise to some of the most extensive contemplative passages in the text, which present his work as a realized counter-example within a failed urbanism, but also in terms of an ethos of self-restraint:

Aménager des espaces perdus, reconquérir une justesse dans le regard. […] Passionné par la spiritualité de la pierre nécessaire pour les maîtres carriers à l’élévation des monastères, il avait toujours en tête l’idéal de la chartreuse. Une unité de construction qui soit refuge, appel et source. […] Son écrin qui borde le Vieux-Port n’a pas connu d’extension. La plupart des barres au nord de Marseille ont été bâtis par des bétonneurs sans scrupule, et l’insonorisation était le cadet de leurs soucis. Comme l’écrit André Suarès, ‘le visionnaire ici n’a d’autre choix que se mutiler’. (MA, 204)

[Developing lost spaces, reconquering a right measure of the gaze. […] With a passion for the spirituality of stone required by the master quarrymen for the elevation of monasteries, the ideal of the charterhouse was always present to his mind. A unit of construction which would be at once refuge, call and source. […] The line of buildings along the Vieux-Port was to know no further extension. The majority of high-rises built in the northern quarters of Marseille were by unscrupulous concrete merchants, and soundproofing was the least of their concerns. As André Suarès wrote: ‘Here, the visionary has no choice but to self-mutilate’.]

In the concluding passages of the book, seated by the same Vieux-Port and shortly after further reference to Pouillon’s architecture ‘[s]ans grandiloquence’ (MA, 237) [devoid of grandiloquence], the author-narrator resumes the auto-analytic mode:

Je me laisse envahir par ce qui succède à l’abattement. Je songe un moment à confier un sentiment nouveau pour moi, la rémission du jugement ou, tout simplement, le refus du sombre partout. […] Personne n’est condamné. […] On peut partir, revenir, ne pas avoir à subir. Recueillir au creux de sa paume un peu d’eau fraiche pour se désaltérer. Ouvrir les poings et les yeux. (MA, 239)

[I give way to what comes after disconsolateness. I think briefly of registering a feeling that is new for me, the suspension of judgement or, quite simply, the refusal to see darkness everywhere. […] Nobody is condemned. […] You can leave, come back, not have to suffer under. Take in the hollow of your hand a little cool water to relieve the thirst. Open your fists and your eyes.]

This up-close view of a healing horizon brings Loi’s text within the critical paradigm developed in recent times by Alexandre Gefen in terms of repairing the world,²⁹ terms that themselves echo the title of a noted 2014 novel by Maylis de Kerangal, Réparer les vivants [Mend the Living].³⁰ But it is essential to stress how, in Loi’s treatment, the processes and possibility of self-healing are coextensive with and parallel to any tenable (socially and politically receivable) act of urban re-imagining. This is not to say that the self has primary or preliminary focus, but to insist upon the indissociable quality of the two – and hence, implicitly, on the dialectical possibility of a better urban life-world.

Utopia and curiosity

Sabrina Calvo’s Sous la colline [Beneath the Hill] (2015) has as its central structuring space the iconic Cité radieuse, Le Corbusier’s first Unité d’habitation (built between 1947 and 1952).³¹ The importance of the building to the status of Marseille as a site of experimental modernism, a central utopian tradition, was clear from the outset, notwithstanding the reactions recounted by Loi above. This was further confirmed (in the seemingly inevitable logic of patrimonialization) by its addition to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016, following an eventful period in which it had been damaged by fire (2012) and seen the opening on its rooftop of the MaMo Centre d’Art Contemporain during Marseille’s tenure as European Capital of Culture in 2013. Calvo’s novel takes the first of these events as its enabling circumstance and entry point into an increasingly fantastical version of the place. Colline, an enigmatic investigator who comes to survey the damage in the aftermath of the fire, discovers within the building a portal opening back to Marseille’s mythical foundational event – the marriage of Gyptis and Protis³² – an origin scene which activates questions around the opposition of nature and culture, human and non-human. This rupture in time and space sets in motion the mythological panoply of the Cité and the surrounding natural space. It releases (inter alia) the figure of the Modulor, developed by Le Corbusier in the years preceding the Cité’s construction as a device to place the human scale at the centre of architectural design, but cast in Calvo’s work as a threatening figure of masculine aggressiveness and a deformed avatar of the conceptual father of the space. A constant interrogative mental presence for Colline, Le Corbusier is nicknamed Le Gris (from the surname Jeanneret-Gris) in the reported thought of the protagonist.

Calvo’s three-part novel (Myesis/Telete/Epoptia) invokes the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece³³ – suggesting for the work a structure of cosmic initiation and revelation that goes directly to the origins of the Massalia/Phocea civic space as a Greek settlement, while unsettling the soberly archaeological or textual treatments which normally accompany such considerations. In short, these mythological-textual underpinnings, well-rehearsed in the civic culture of modern Marseille, are mobilized here as enablers of a form of urban fantasy with important links to contemporary trends in both fantasy writing and video game cultures. Key to the poetics of Calvo’s novel is her other identity as a video game designer. As the author explained in a 2015 seminar, both of these activities come into their own when cross-fertilized with the properties of the other: ‘je fais des jeux comme j’écris des livres et j’écris des livres comme je fais des jeux’ [I create games like I write books – and I write books like I create games].³⁴ This duality of Calvo’s creative practice has significant consequences for the directions taken by Sous la colline, both in terms of narrative content and of style. It allows for a particular fluidity in the mélange des genres practiced by the text – whereby several generic veins move in and out of focus, including the detective novel, the realist novel of contemporary life, the fantastic/fantasy text, the horror novel, free-form poetic prose and elements which display affinity with bande dessinée and manga aesthetics. The work is propelled forward by a sometimes breathless kinetic energy, in which, through the succession of events, characters can seem expendable or interchangeable. This characteristic is reinforced by elements of the (profuse) dialogue, conducted with a staccato intensity and a noticeable abundance of Anglicisms, which add to the sense of a textual universe evolving on its own terms.

The splicing of generic traits is of a pair with the ‘mash-up’ quality of Calvo’s dramatic personnel – where characters (human, non-human and in-between) from several parallel universes or imaginaries are integrated into a textual flow facilitated by the unité du lieu of Le Corbusier’s realization. This kind of hybridity is observable in earlier work of the author, such as the treatment of Los Angeles in the 2006 Minuscules flocons de neige depuis dix minutes [Minuscule Snowflakes for the Last Ten Minutes], as well as in the post-apocalyptic Île de Montréal of Toxoplasma [Toxoplasma], published in 2017 – both cities with which, like Marseille, Calvo has a biographical connection.³⁵ A further hybridity is observable in the registers brought into contact within the expanded possibilities of the fictional poetics. While there is much that feels throwaway in the pop-cultural tropes that proliferate, Calvo irrigates this approach with (inter alia) an interest in the spiritual and the esoteric which has the effect, in Sous la colline, of fashioning what reads as a fully cosmic stake to what had started out as an apparently prosaic civic investigation.

This is only one way of understanding the effect of stratification achieved in the linking of the Cité radieuse to the archaeological and mythological pasts. Another is to refocus, as in our reading of Loi, on the problem of the (would-be utopian) subject of experience. The action of the novel is led by the eponymous Colline, who arrives bearing her own ambivalent sense of a better possibility – articulated early in the text by the characteristically shifting narrative voice:

Tout au fond de Colline, là où le mensonge se dissout, il y a un secret. Un secret plus vaste que le cosmos, qui embrasse la nature même de ce qu’elle est, Colline, de ce qu’elle nous cache. C’est une révolution autour d’un astre jeune, né d’une super-nova. Un vortex où prend naissance la source qui menace de tout emporter. (S, 15)

[Deep down in Colline, in that place where lies dissolve, there is a secret. A secret bigger than the cosmos, which embraces the very nature of what she is, Colline, of what she hides from us. It is a revolution around a yellow star, born of a supernova. A vortex birthing the source which threatens to carry everything away.]

Both the spatial assemblage of the fictionalized Cité and the abyssal construct of the protagonist’s inner struggles contain an explosive alloy of utopian possibility and catastrophic potential – and this again is consonant with the multiply generic feel of the work, down to the granular level of individual sentences and formulations. This concordance of inner and outer spaces and layerings is readable in terms of a queer aesthetic, in which the transitioning subject-protagonist acts as a mirror to her boundary-defiant life-world. But there is the basis in addition for a reflection on the ambivalent quality of the iconic ‘utopian’ space in which Colline’s experiences unfold. The Cité emerges in the text as something of a ‘past future’, a utopian trace of the social dreaming proper to a previous generation. A preoccupation of Sous la colline is with a refiguring and re-engagement with that vestigial utopian impulse, from within the unavoidably oppressive confines of the everyday. The realized, territorialized outcome of a utopian vision, the Cité is understood by Colline as already belonging to history, while also being a reminder of the banality of utopian practice in the here and now – in which there is no tidy compartmentalization of the individual and the community, but the persistence of one and the other:

Il faudrait avoir envie de rester et de construire quelque chose en ce lieu. Mais qui voudrait ça? Il y a quelques décennies, peut-être, quand l’utopie se mettait en place, que le rêve battait son plein, mais maintenant, c’est foutu. […] Alors, aller où? Et puis tu t’es vue? Qui va t’accepter? Arrête de te projeter comme ça. […] Ne perds pas de vue ton destin, Colline. (S, 88)

[You would have to want to stay and build something in this place. But who would want that? A few decades ago, maybe, when [the] utopia was being put in place, when the dream was at its height, but now – it’s screwed. […] So – where to go? And – have you seen yourself? Who will accept you? Stop projecting yourself like that. […] Don’t lose sight of your destiny, Colline.]

It is all the more striking, then, that Calvo’s text moves towards something approaching a sublime horizon, where identities fuse, and in which an incantatory ‘Nous’ is the last entity to speak. In the closing section (termed Epoptia – denoting a higher level of revelation/initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries), the text utilizes its full freedom in dematerializing any remaining spatial constraints that pertain to realist treatments of the built environment, to enter the register of cosmically infused fantasy.³⁶ Transition, here, is a prerogative of textual action. Before a sheer wall in Zone 17 of the ‘Corbu’, Colline and other women of the building seek a way through:

– Tu vas faire comment? dit Flo, en voyant Colline s’approcher de la porte.

Colline lève la main.

– Improviser […]

Et si tout simplement, elle avait compris comment ôter le filtre qui empêche les yeux humains de contempler Nature? […] Alors, naturellement, faire appel à la Gyre, derrière toute chose. Placer tes doigts sur la surface, la paume en dernier. Sentir se défaire les coutures du réel, liquéfiées, alors que tu trouves le chemin. […]

Elle enjambe le fossé entre les mondes, sent la présence de l’Unité d’Habitation s’effacer, laisser la place au mouvement initial, à la première impulsion. Un bain d’émotions les envahit collectivement, unis dans une ronde, dans cette vague, ce trait d’union. L’infini d’un espace courbe.

Aussi vite que ça a commencé, ça s’achève.

Elles traversent toutes ensemble. (S, 405–06)

[– what will you do? says Flo, seeing Colline move towards the door.

Colline raises her hand,

– Improvise […]

And what if, quite simply, she had understood how to remove the filter that prevents human eyes from contemplating Nature? […] So then, naturally, call upon the Gyre that is behind everything. Put your fingers on the surface, palms last. Feel the seams of the real come undone, liquified, while you find the way. […]

She steps across the chasm between worlds, feels the presence of the Unité d’Habitation diminish, leave room for the initial movement, the first impulse. A wash of emotions goes through them collectively, united in a ring, in that wave, that hyphen. The infinite of a curved space.

As quickly as it began, it ends.

They cross over all together.]

The space into which Calvo’s cast transition at the close of Sous la colline is one borne up by the prosodic and incantatory power of the writing, emphasizing the clear difference of the literary text in the outlet it offers to imagination. Colline’s ‘destiny’ appears to be this textual apotheosis, in which the radically curious subject of action breaks through to a choral collective subject position. In this phase of the work, the city and its imperfections, it could be argued, have been left far behind, in the manner of jettisoned boosters on a rocket… but the greater point articulated appears to be an ethical one, very much in tune with the contemporary necessity Marielle Macé has written of in her exhortation to: ‘ne pas se hâter de stabiliser les relations, ne pas se risquer à changer les non-humains en humains, considérer patiemment les liens possibles, parier sur les métamorphoses, relancer l’imagination’ [be in no rush to stabilize relations, don’t take the chance of changing non-humans into humans, consider patiently what links are possible, wager on metamorphoses, fire up the imagination].³⁷

Utopia and disobedience

In the contemporary questioning of classical categories and boundaries faced with ecological urgencies and the paradigm of the Anthropocene, this imperative of categorical openness seems well advised – especially in its appeal to the transformative power of the imagination. The category of utopia can appear, in this respect, bound up in an earlier, modernist opposition of culture and nature. Yet even where the distinction appears clearly delineated, a potentially critical process may be underway. Writing on the ‘politics of utopia’ in 2004, Jameson remarked:

The truth of the vision of nature lies in the way in which it discloses the complacency of the urban celebration; but the opposite is also true, and the vision of the city exposes everything nostalgic and impoverished in the embrace of nature. Another way of thinking about the matter is the reminder that each of these utopias is a fantasy, and has precisely the value of a fantasy – something not realized and indeed unrealizable in that partial form.³⁸

In the search for utopia the vision of nature can be understood thus as a ‘partial vision’ (to borrow and recontextualize the expression of Angelika Bammer),³⁹ but which has a critical contribution to make to the understanding of the relations of subject and city, and of the city as a space of utopian agency. It is in this way that Maylis de Kerangal’s Corniche Kennedy (2008) offers an oblique extension of the very different spatial and affective trajectories of Loi and Calvo through Marseille, apprehending as it does the urban reality from a triple distance: the ‘other’ space of the sea; the perspective of an ‘out-group’; the angle of adolescent experience in rebellion against an ‘adult’ urban dystopia.⁴⁰ This triple distance finds its space in the heterotopia of ‘la Plate’ and those who congregate there:

Les petits cons de la corniche. La bande. On ne sait les nommer autrement. Leur corps est incisif, leur âge dilaté entre treize et dix-sept, et c’est un seul et même âge, celui de la conquête: on détourne la joue du baiser maternel, on crache dans la soupe, on déserte la maison.

Nul ne sait comment cette plate-forme ingrate, nue, une paume, est devenue leur carrefour, le point magique où ils rassemblent et énoncent le monde, ni comment ils l’ont trouvée, élue entre toutes et s’en sont rendus maîtres; et nul ne sait pourquoi ils y reviennent chaque jour, y dégringolent, haletants, crasseux et assoiffés, l’exubérance de la jeunesse excédant chacun de leurs gestes, y déboulent comme si chassés de partout, refoulés, blessés, la dernière connerie trophée en travers de la gueule; mais aussi, ça ne veut pas de nous tout ça déclament-ils en tournant sur eux-mêmes, bras tendu main ouverte de sorte qu’ils désignent la grosse ville qui turbine, la cité maritime qui brasse et prolifère, ça ne veut pas de nous, ils forcent la scène, hâbleurs et rigolards, enfin se déshabillent, soudain lents et pudiques, dressent leur camp de base, et alors ils s’arrogent tout l’espace. (C, 14–15, emphasis added)

[The little brats from the corniche. The gang. No other name for them. Their body is incisive, their age dilates between thirteen and seventeen and it is all one age – that of conquest: of turning away from the motherly kiss, of spitting in the soup, of deserting the home.

No-one knows how that bleak and bare platform, the palm of a hand, became their meeting place, the magical point where they come together and enunciate the world, nor how they found it – elect among all places – and became masters of it. And no-one knows why they return there every day, rushing down, panting, dirty and thirsty, with the exuberance of youth leaping out of each and every gesture, arriving there as if run out of everywhere else, kicked out, wounded, the latest jackass stunt beaming from their snouts. But also – no-one will give us a break! they shout out, circling on themselves, arms raised hands open so as to point to the huge city growling away, the maritime stronghold churning and proliferating, no-one wants us! they climb on stage, full of talk and laughter, then undress, suddenly slow and modest, set up their base camp and then they lay claim to all of the space.]

This expository extract demonstrates Kerangal’s flair for panoramic (spatial and social) descriptive accumulation,⁴¹ a pronounced stylistic trait that goes on to achieve other socially suggestive effects in Naissance d’un pont [Birth of a Bridge] (2010) and the aforementioned Réparer les vivants.⁴² Here, it is placed at the service of an experience of the natural and social worlds on the cusp of adulthood (another established theme of the author, that of adolescent dissidence, flowing from Dans les rapides [In the Rapids] published the previous year and set in a northern semi-analogue, Le Havre, the author’s home town).⁴³ In the face of this teenage secession, the character of the police officer Sylvestre Opéra, monitoring the group for its mildly anti-social exuberance then, more aggressively, as a plot line around a missing drugs shipment unfolds, links the heterotopia of ‘la Plate’ (and its age cohort) to the wider realities of Marseille. The phenomenological realism of the novel is put in greater relief by the generic second degree of this plot (echoing the city’s most conventional form of literary presentation, the polar) – which it is never possible to take entirely seriously. As if the heterotopia had its own, physically underwritten, more real and hence more serious mode of experience, beyond the constraints and social categories of the city – a form of carnavalesque in reverse, however playful. The solar existence of ‘la bande’ is reminiscent of Albert Camus’s early essayistic evocations of the Algiers of his childhood and gestures towards a comparable humanism of embodied transcendence under the Mediterranean sun. But it also brings into focus a subject of consistent anxiety and hope to be encountered in the cultural production of and around contemporary Marseille – that of the child and adolescent, the subject in development, both as a figure of vulnerability and a promise of potential change.⁴⁴

As the gang at the corniche emboldens itself increasingly against the law represented by Opéra, a section towards the middle of the novel (C, 108–25) describes a police raid organized at their diving spots – the successively higher and more dangerous ‘la Plate’, ‘le Just Do It’ and ‘le Face to Face’ – and the processing of the group, brought back to the station to be fined. Opéra, in hot pursuit of a delinquent diver, finds himself suddenly transfixed and transformed as he stands on the Just Do It:

L’espace est profus autour de lui, très échancré, saturé de milliards de particules microscopiques qui planent et vibrent, pollinisent, diffractant doucement la lumière. Opéra sent son corps qui se débride, visage élargi, front et narines mêmement dilatés, thorax bombé, tendu soudain, peinant à contenir l’élan qui le soulève, son cœur prend de la vitesse, il oscille, le voilà transfuge, pris dans un emballement, celui d’une vie bigger than life, innervé de la tête aux pieds par une émotion très matérielle, il se découvre puissant, frontal, aimant […]. (C, 110–11)

[The space is profuse around him, very jagged, saturated with billions of microscopic particles which vibrate as they glide, pollinate, softly diffracting the light. Opéra feels his body untethering, face widened, forehead and nostrils likewise dilated, throat arched outwards, suddenly tensed, struggling to contain the movement carrying him upwards, his heart picks up speed, he oscillates, now he’s a defector, caught up in a flight of energy, that of a life bigger than life, innervated from head to toe by a very material emotion, he discovers himself powerful, frontal, loving […].]

When the group is processed at the station, a few pages later, it is for once decomposed into its individual members and we read of those individuals’ relations with the socio-economic geography of the city. With some on the cusp of leaving education, they constitute a variety of profiles in disadvantage, though the geographies of exclusion of Marseille remain in the background.⁴⁵ The main exception to this rule is arguably Suzanne, ‘qui vit à cent mètres de là, dans une villa de style’ [who lives a hundred metres away, in a classy villa], and whose relations with Eddy – ‘père artisan taxi, mère au foyer’ (C, 114) [father taxi-driver (self-employed), mother housewife] – and Mario – ‘famille désintégrée dans la violence, père en prison, mère multipliant les séjours en hôpital psychiatrique’ (C, 113) [family broken by violence, father in prison, mother multiple stays in a psychiatric hospital] – come to the fore in the novel’s representation of the group, and of what events carry the narration forward. But what seems assured, from this section onwards, is that the novel’s ‘social’ focus is on the dissident sociability of the subjects who share in the experience inhabited accidentally by Opéra in the passage cited above. As such, it proposes a priority of shared joy over control and invites a new consideration of much that is characterized in public discourses on Marseille (and beyond) as dysfunctional, anti-social or politically anxiogenic. Here again, it appears, hope lies in the marginal pursuits of disobedient individual subjects, in isolation and in concert, alive to the resources of the urban world they inhabit, energized in the resistances they feel to (and from) it, and defiantly not going anywhere else.

Footnotes