Cartography of Mass City-zenry in Global Netscapes in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Short Stories ‘Los desaarraigados’ [‘The Uprooted’] and ‘La grieta’ [‘The Crevice’].

Abstract

While traditional storytelling was based on oral renderings as imagined by a narrator, now the trends are often based on the visual readings of events as imagined by the availability of Google Earth street view. It is for this reason that the spatial contours of different narrative strategies become very visible through a kind of bird’s eye view of the zooming camera, or the long shots as well as the deep structures of the items which inhabit that space through the close-ups. Digitalization has activated the perfection of this kind of zooming in/out of the camera’s eye view so that not only are the given spatial contours rendered visible, but they are also rendered as designs of urban spaces of what was earlier considered to be jungles. Conceptions of the Foucauldian notions of hidden and ambiguous spaces such as heterotopias and of surveillance spatial tropes such as the Panopticon become exposed so that simple structures like Angel Rama’s Ciudad letrada eventually look very innocent.[1]

This paper is an attempt to read how Peri Rossi narrativizes this in her rendition of urban space. It is a space under the continuous surveillance of the town planners and managers (the Panopticon), while at the same time a critique of such spaces created and deployed to ”hide” the dehumanized faces of targeting thinking subjects (Heterotopia).[2] This is real space, and not an imagined one (utopia/dystopia) engineered for wielding power and control over the lives of citizens. Thus the most important point to reckon with is that this urban space is articulated neither as any linearity of causal relationships, nor in the sense of any binary oppositions such as “centre/periphery”; rather it is configured as performative so that the agents of surveillance and control who remain invisible are rendered exposed. The perception of the analogy between a Google earth view and this narrative, in this context, is very significant and politically charged and fits into the Foucauldian notions of the Panopticon. The sentry who keeps watch on the tower of the prison is now substituted by the new technology of digital surveillance systems enabled by Google Earth.

Now let us consider that while urban spaces have been known to be highly gendered, what about the cyberspace? Early colonizers, hackers and navigators of cyberspace had imagined it as virtual and hence as genderless, bodiless, raceless and without borders. Though this myth is no longer valid, we still find that urban planners who design corporatized infrastructure for smooth and efficient mass transit have increasingly striven towards creations of real space copied from Google Earth view cyberscapes, rendering irrelevant any difference markers and ironing them out into mere cyborgs. Imagining genderless, raceless and desexualized bodies is a copy of an imagined virtual space which pretends to be safe, without any risks and immediate consequences. Thus Peri Rossi’s cities are nameless global cities, which tease out the aesthetics and the politics of “inclusive social care” and “disparate economic competition” in neoliberal democracies. They are inhabited by nameless and rootless global citizens who navigate through unknown waters like blind and drifting mechanized dolls (one can’t help remembering Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Borges’ Ficciones) almost directionless, thus invoking the myth of the Ship of the Madmen, which is also a title of an earlier collection of stories by Peri Rossi. How are such spaces produced? There is a process of gentrification of elite centres (Rama’s proposal); however the rest is mapped out as a global friendly network based on the model of the designs of “optimal efficiency” flattened out graphically on available Internet stencils.

The maps that now govern our “globalised” world suggest a world in which public spaces are increasingly privatized, in which poverty exacerbated by neo-colonial and neoliberal economic practice pushes more and more people to migrate, only to find themselves criminalized as “illegal” aliens by those who guard “legitimate” access to nation-states. Shall such maps be reproduced in cyberspace? What recourse—what lines of flight, what type of travel, what practices of resistance—can be made in cyberspace for protest, justice, or alternative realities? (Lane 129)

It is no wonder then that global cities, increasingly privatized spaces, are nodes of global circuits through which there is a unidirectional flow of capital across the different ‘scapes’:. financescapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes and mediascapes. To all of this I add ‘netscapes’ and ‘cyberscapes’. These comprise space as a process produced through which deterritorialization is implicated in South-North or East-West movements (exile, diaspora and migration). Such circuits may also be facilitated by cultural items for example; the hamburger, the sandwich or English cream. The overlapping and crossing over of these different ‘scapes’ implicate a new kind of economics and politics of exchange as local modes are woven into global neo-liberal systems. The city, instead of the nation, negotiates a new proposal for city-zenship in terms of its claims on the occupants of its spaces.

At the limit, this could be an opening for new forms of “citizenship.” The city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an “organisational commodity”, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalised a presence in large cities as capital. The de-nationalising of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question, whose city is it? (Sassen 146-147)

Peri Rossi’s stories critique these urban architectures of order and power engineered to render mute any thinking subject. At the same time a nomadic kind of ethos is evoked to conceive of the states of cities inhabited by anonymous “men and women who float on air suspended in huge time and space” (Peri Rossi 71); transit and disorientation feature in these stories articulating anxieties of mobility and the disorder they produce. Peri Rossi’s city is such a space, richly carved out in text in ‘Los desarraigados’[3], negotiating these situations of spatial tropes on the one hand and of their subversion thereafter. This story maps the urban space from within the deep waters of the entire global space. The sense of not belonging is played out again and again like a poetic refrain. Heterotopias have stretched and extended their borders across global neoliberal spaces. The subjects do everything like eating, sleeping differently, they wake up in hotel rooms forgetting the name of the city they are in. Their condition of lack of rootedness makes them always vulnerable to suspicion though they themselves might feel that their mobile condition is a privilege; however when they are blown off, they are blown off more easily. The poetic evocation of their temporality as floating signifiers in a virtual space evading any conceptual or material form is significant. Metaphoric nomadism is portrayed with brush strokes of fluid idiom.

A menudo se ven, caminando por las calles de las grandes ciudades, a hombres y mujeres que flotan en el aire, en un tiempo y espacio suspendidos. Carecen de raíces en los pies, y a veces hasta carecen de pies. No les brotan raíces de los cabellos ni suaves líanas atan su tronco a alguna clase de suelo. Son como algas impulsadas por las corrientes marinas, y cuando se fijan a alguna superficie es por casualidad y dura sólo un momento. En seguida vuelven a flotar y hay cierta nostalgia en ello. [Peri Rossi 71][4]

Very often men and women afloat in the air can be seen walking down the streets of the great cities in suspended time and space. They lack roots in their feet, and at times even lack any feet. Roots don’t grow out of their hair either, nor do suave ropes tie their trunk to some kind of ground. They are like algae adrift through the ocean currents and when they stick to some surface, just by chance, they last only a while. Soon after they begin to float again and there is some nostalgia that remains. [My translation].

A zooming in closer to land renders visible a citizenship (as a belonging to a nation/community with rights and responsibilities) getting reduced to a “membership” programmed into the internet game, and thus submitting to the rules of the game such that any scope of her/his subjectivity as thinking and feeling agent is completely muffled out. One is easily reminded of the distracted viewer/reader as compared to the contemplative one in the beginning of the last century. Now we have the distracted, bodiless, genderless and raceless entities that move unthinkingly.[5] This is how citizens experience the spaces of global cities, which are engineered to “deliver development”. Infrastructural facilities network these spaces both materially and virtually so that citizenship as a “privilege and as agency” is produced, deployed and displayed as mass/crowd for smooth navigational controls following pre-meditated moves on the designs of the internet game for management of mobility. Such activated circuits, sometimes so fast that they are like an adrenal rush though Peri Rossi’s narrative, seem to move like slow turtles as passengers aboard a plane who can’t feel the speed. The Foucauldian conception of the Panopticon plays out here in its prime peak instant.[6]

Similarly in Peri Rossi’s “La grieta”[7] one small banal (thinking) hesitation of the subject’s move sets off a pandemonium ripple effect in the order of mass transit in a railway station. The grammar of the urban space management cannot accept even the most insignificant incorrect punctuation mark. The hesitating man becomes an unpardonable morpheme before the official syntax of a global network as he doesn’t remember, for a brief moment, whether he was going up or down the stairs of the over bridge. Whether an outsider or otherwise, the occupants of the global cities are anonymous passersby; their conditions of continuous movements constitute the global circuits which sustain the movement of the different “scapes” as mentioned above. The provisionality of their situation highlights the provisionality of their identities in terms of race, colour and gender. Exile is a general condition of all, as is their anonymity. They are the mass people.

El hombre vaciló al subir la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro del metro, y al producirse esta pequeña indecisión de su parte (no sabía si seguir o quedarse, si avanzar o retroceder, en realidad tuvo la duda de si se encontraba bajando o subiendo) graves trastornos ocurrieron alrededor. La compacta muchedumbre que le seguía rompió el denso entramado – sin embargo, casual – de tiempo y espacio, desperdigándose, como una estrella que al explotar, provoca diáspora de luces y algún eclipse. [266]

The man hesitated while going up the stairs which led from one station to the other of the   metro, and thanks to this brief moment of hesitation on his part (he didn’t know whether to   move on or stay, to proceed or regress, in fact he doubted whether he was climbing up or going down the staircase) serious disturbances occurred around there. The compact crowd that followed him broke the dense network, however casual, in time and space, scattering like a star, which on explosion, provoke a diaspora of lights and some eclipse. [My translation].

The staircase becomes a metaphor of a conduit in the network and discounts any articulation of passion by its occupants. The corollary is that any irrationality disables the efficiency of the conduit. Both the conduit and its occupants (the crowd) are vulnerable to a breakdown given their game plan kind of structures. The protagonist is just one in a crowd whose identity becomes irrelevant. Gender, ethnic, racial and even bodily confusions are played out as fragmentary and as borderless as language itself. The entire discourse of a smooth efficient network with its connectivity, communicability and reliability is critiqued. In a mass transit system, gendered entities are disoriented, bodies are disintegrated as wigs; dentures, glasses and fashion accessories fly off from their assigned places.

Hombres perplejos resbalaron, mujeres gritaron, niños fueron aplastados, un anciano perdió la peluca, una dama su dentadura postiza, se desparramaron los abalorios de un vendedor ambulante, alguien aprovechó la ocasión  para robar unas revistas del quiosco, hubo un intento de violación, salto un reloj de una mano al aire y varias mujeres intercambiaron sin querer sus bolsos. [266]

Perplexed men slipped, women screamed and children were crushed, an old man lost his wig, a lady her denture, the cheap items of a mobile salesman got scattered, someone got an opportunity to steal magazines from a kiosk, there was an attempt to rape, one watch flew out of someone’s hand and many women involuntarily exchanged their purses. [My translation].

The text thus exposes the porous borders that draw the global urban maps imagining safe, civilized and equally accessible spatial tropes. The guards immediately take charge to set everything in order.

El hombre fue detenido, posteriormente, y acusado de perturbar el orden público. El mismo había sufrido las consecuencias de su imprudencia, ya que, en el tumulto, se le quebró un diente. Se pudo determinar que, en el momento del incidente, el hombre que vaciló en la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro (a veinticinco metros de profundidad y con luz artificial de día y de noche) era el hombre que estaba en el tercer lugar de la fila número quince, siempre y cuando se hubieran establecido lugares y filas para el ascenso y descenso de la escalera. [266-267].

The man was detained and charged with having disturbed public order. He himself had suffered the consequences of his recklessness because, in the tumult, he broke a tooth. It could be established that at the time of the incident, the man who hesitated on the stairs that   led from one platform to another (at twenty five meters depth, lit with artificial light by day and night) was the man who was in third place row number fifteen, provided they had established rows and places for the ascending and descending the staircase. [My translation].

The narrative thus renders exposed how the city is a Panopticon. The security personnel knew exactly where this man was at the instant of his momentary hesitation which jammed the smooth functioning of this manufactured spatial apparatus. However, the cityscape with its fluid boundaries is recast almost immediately like an elastic matter ready to play its next game. But the odd man who peoples this space is unbendable as he begins gazing at the crevice on the wall. The crevice works like a metaphor for a break, yet it is also one that continuously draws the attention of the man. There is break in coordination between the state machinery and its subjects. The panoptic city hence continues to interrogate him. His answer is always the same: that he’d forgotten whether he was going up or down the staircase; that perhaps it did not really matter; that he had his right foot lifted and that a crowd was present ahead and behind, and for a moment he didn’t know! There was thus also a break between the man’s memory and his own body. The city and his body become analogous tropes of control and unitary perfection, which fail momentarily because of loss of memory. Ironically, he also reflects on the fact that the staircase was an artefact used to go up or down, antithetical actions. The crevice thus articulates a counter-narrative critique of the unitary perfections of a cityscape and its inhabitants.

The complete breakdown of communication between the man and the officer is a blotch on the entire paradigm of control by the state and its allies. This breakdown is located in a complex in-between-ness, as it works both ways. The officer’s interrogation cannot extract a satisfactory response from the man while the man too, as he spoke, continued to be distracted by the growing size of the crevice on the wall, which was grey or green. The only answer he claimed about the crevice was that it was a literary artefact. The crevice as a literary artefact also metaphorizes break and discontinuity, between language and silence as also between desire and reality. The growing crevice on the wall symbolizes a point of spatial critique and intersection of the panoptic, which breaks. It is at this point that the man’s mind drifts off towards conceptualizing the “spatialization of culture” as he reckons with the difficulty of grasping reality in terms of its time and ‘direction’, “si no hay continuidad, equivale a afirmar que no existe ninguna realidad, salvo el momento” (270) [“In the absence of continuity, you have to accept that no reality exists apart from the present”, [My translation]. Further down he says, “La altura en que estuviera colocado decidía, en este caso, la direccion.” [270] [“The direction was determined, in this instance, by the level at which the eye was situated. {My translation}]”  The narrative that follows is clearly reminiscence of an Internet game space.

Es curioso que el mismo instrumento sirva tanto para subir como para bajar, siendo en el fondo, acciones opuestas – reflexionó el hombre, en voz alta….un minuto antes de la vacilación – continuó – , la memoria hizo una laguna. La memoria navega, hace agua. No sirvió; quedó atrapada en el subterráneo. [270].

Its odd that the same instrument is good for going up and down-at heart two antithetical actions,’ the man thought aloud…A moment before hesitation ,’ he continued, ‘a gap opened in my memory. Memory can drift, spring a leak. Mine got stuck in the underground, it was no use.’ [My translation].

This momentary loss of a working memory is not amnesia but a ‘literary device’ and ‘una grieta inesperada’ or ‘an unexpected crack’ (271), like a hung Internet space. The citizen transiting this space had difficulty seeing as “solo una abstraccion nos permitía saber, cuando nos sumergimos, si la corriente nos desliza hacia el origen o hacia la desembocadura del río, si empieza o termina” (271) [‘when submerged, only an abstraction allows us to know whether the current is taking us to the source or the outlet of the river, to where it begins or ends’ {My translation}]. Like the Internet game space, there are neither beginnings nor endings, or rather they are just provisional and are meant to score a point. The foot, half raised, halted due to uncertainty. ‘No hay ningún dramatismo en ello, sino una especie de turbacion.’ [271] [‘There was nothing dramatic about it, just a kind of confusion.’{My translation}] The foot is narrated as a fragment of the body of the man, which is disabled due to a brief gap in memory resulting in confusion, not an epic hero who strives to change the world. He barely manages to survive it. It almost reads like the cursor on the computer screen, which can’t move because the computer is hung. The analogy of the real space with the virtual one only serves to highlight the nature of this spatial contour as heterotopias. Heterotopias are spaces, which exist in all cultures but function differently as per situations of each culture. They are such spaces which are real spaces but relate to/juxtapose with utopias and real spaces of both geophysical and virtual types. They are manufactured and artificially put in place and include for example prisons, asylums, zoos or gardens which are either forbidden or privileged spaces. Peri Rossi’s city-as-home, fits in as a heterotopic space which groups together citi-zens as members who have had to be permitted into “accommodation” in order to be subjected to control and surveillance. Such permissions are granted under conditions of a pre-figured, strict systemic grammar of behaviour and anyone who does not follow this grammar is coolly picked out to ‘cleanse’ the space and put it back in order. So this odd man, who invests in “thinking” can’t possibly belong to this order.

It is interesting for us, at this point to make note of the writer’s brief biography.[8] She is an Uruguayan who has lived in exile since 1972 in Franco’s Spain, in Barcelona. She was expelled again in 1974 for anti-fascist activism, after which time she took refuge in Paris for nine months. She then married and moved back to Spain. In an interview with the famous Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, she explains her experience of exile and abandonment thus.

This second exile lasted some nine months. It wasn’t only exile; the problem was that the dictatorship had revoked my citizenship, and then I had no   documents. I was, in fact, stateless and clandestine in France, which put me in a state of acute anxiety.

… … … …

I appealed to the brotherliness of my Communist comrades in Spain, and I found a husband. We were brave, because only the church could marry people, and divorce didn’t exist. I entered Spain secretly, and I found a leftist priest to marry us, and obtained Spanish citizenship. Luckily, my husband was gay. (The Artiste’s Voice)

Peri Rossi’s feeling of rootlessness and statelessness as a Uruguayan political exile also overlaps with a kind of economic abandonment of neoliberal agendas in her home country. Add to this the fact that she is gay herself and thus when the interviewer asks her if patriotism is an undesirable factor, she responds

I completely agree. But, if I tell you this, it’s because I put myself in the place of people who love their homeland. In other words, here, when they ask me, “What are you more, Spanish or Uruguayan?” I say, “I am a citizen of the world.” In any part of the world, I defend the same things. I lived in Berlin where I defended the same things. When I arrived here, I fought against   Franco, just like I would have fought for Allende, if I had been in Chile. But that doesn’t mean that all countries are the same to me. The ones I feel a kinship with are those in which justice, and human and animal rights are defended. That’s the true homeland. (The Artistes’ Voice)

Yet in post-Franco Spain she maintains that her favourite past time is playing games on the Internet, and not reading literature or seeing good movies.

There you have it! I believe that knowledge is uncomfortable, and when I want to amuse myself, I play games on the Internet. I don’t amuse myself with music, movies, or paintings. When it comes to those things, I actually suffer.   But suffering is also a type of knowledge. A biology book can seem very entertaining to me. I don’t ask that it be well written. I do ask that it provide information. I always demand that literature be written well, because that’s what pertains to literature, correct? (The Artistes’ Voice)

The point here to be noted is that in spite of what Peri Rossi claims, we do see how her experience with internet gaming as amusement has perforated into her literary disposition, which she believes only nurtures itself from her knowledge as suffering. On the contrary, amusement and suffering contribute equally. In another interview she says the following regarding her last collection of short stories, Habitaciones.

En los dos últimos años, al mismo tiempo que poesía, había escrito varios relatos, de temas y extensión diferentes. Cuando los leí, me di cuenta de que algunos se desarrollaban en habitaciones cerradas: una celda de prisión, la habitación de un psiquiátrico y varios hoteles. Tenían otra cosa en común: reflejaban el mundo estrictamente contemporáneo del capitalismo salvaje, con sus numerosos artilugios de comunicación – celulares, Internet, congresos, pantallas- pero no había verdadera comunicación. Había prisa, pero incomunicación, soledad, y poca esperanza. Es un tema que me fascina: en el primer mundo, la mayor cantidad de aparatos de comunicación, las personas se tocan menos, conversan menos, comparten menos.

Para ser escuchados, pagan al psicólogo, y para ser tocados, al masajista. Pero no son culpables de esta manera de vivir; la responsabilidad la tiene esta fase del capitalismo financiero, salvaje y destructivo. Esta transformación del mundo a principios del s. XXI me inquieta y la observo con la imparcialidad de una cronista. (Entrevista a Cristina Peri Rossi.)

During the past two years, I had written several stories as well as poetry of different themes and extension. When I read, I realized that some were developed in closed rooms: a prison cell, the room of a psychiatric, a hospital and several hotels. They had another thing in common: they strictly reflected the contemporary world of unbridled capitalism, with its many communication gadgets – phones, Internet, conference halls and displays, but there was no real communication. There was rush, isolation, loneliness, and very little hope. It is a subject that fascinates me: in the first world, the greater the number of communication devices, the less they talk, the less they actually play and the less they share.

To be heard, they pay the psychologist, and to be touched, the masseur. But they are not guilty of this conduct as the responsibility lies with this phase of financial capitalism, wild and destructive. This transformation of the world at the beginning of s. XXI makes me restless and I watch it with the impartiality of a reporter.) [My translation]

What she talks about here with respect to communication is also true of commuting through mass transit systems. What she talks of here with respect to closed spaces becomes relevant also with respect to public spaces. These are the heterotopias designed, derided and deployed to stupefy citizens as subjects and to “colonize” them in newer ways. There is no scope of any talking nor hearing, nor any touching or of sharing. However, only a hung space enables screaming, or a pinching, or a molestation, or a near rape amidst the confusion of violence, indifference and deafness. It is only in the hung space where “gender” plays out as pervert hysteria so that the ‘he’/ ‘she’ seems to disentangle themselves out into shameful prominence. Hybridity of peoples and their bodies, spaces and idioms and the uselessness of mechanical movements, driven to patterns of banal everyday gaming, thus render mute any scope of agency, whether as a collective or an individual. Only the crowd, anonymity and exile feed into nomadic global conduits of irrelevant/imagined economic and political “stances” of a culture of predatory ‘management’ system of neoliberalism constantly under the surveillance of a police state. The police state, however, is also fraught with the same risks of routine prescriptive moves, blind to any difference of any ‘literary device’

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