Author: Anvita Budhraja
Global space in the contemporary novel is a deliberately crafted and carefully constructed setting for human action that reveals a concerted, programmatic effort to give meaning to the space the novel inhabits. The term “curation” springs to mind as it’s a term for a very particular guardianship or supervision of preserved and exhibited objects (OED). In other words, the creation of space through curation involves the selection and exhibition of specific objects — the relationship among which is thematic or conceptual rather than personal or chronological. In “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” Fredric Jameson describes the moment in history inaugurated by the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980span as one defined by new spatial configurations, or constellations of distinct objects in a particular space. From this it follows that aesthetic space is very much a curator’s project, an installation or a conceptual space, and curation, therefore, a practice and technique distinctive to late twentieth and twentieth-first century literary space, including the novel. Today’s artistic space can be distinguished from the traditional artistic spaces of the home and the city street, because it announces itself as an intellectual space and one that transcends individuals and so is neither personal nor accidental.
The globalized urban spaces in which the action of so many contemporary novels takes place becomes such an artistic space, which comes under the charge of the contemporary author-as-curator. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, both published in 2005 curate two such global spaces, specific spaces in London and Japan respectively. To see these settings in two of Jameson’s curated installations requires the reader to examine their construction as such: what concepts control the selection and arrangement of object and how are we to understand their relation to the figure of the curator within the novel, as well as the author and the publication apparatus that ensures that these spatial configurations can travel beyond the nation and reach a global readership. The commercial aspect of curating contemporary artistic space is immediately evident—from Jameson’s claim that the “strategy” for the curation of singular intellectual spaces derives from “curation’s” roots in an institution like the museum, institutions that are ultimately commercial. One indeed encounters the marketing of such global spaces themselves in these novels, both of which suggest that the term “brand” is now a way of conceptualizing such spaces. That is to say, the contemporary novel transforms certain global spaces into a branded space identified with a unique confluence of specific local objects to form globally identifiable markers. The branding process links certain spaces to the author who has curated them for global distribution.
The postmodern moment rejects what Jameson calls the “universal generic of art” and instead finds aesthetic value in name-brand combinations or constellations of strange and different objects assembled at identifiable national spaces in the global circulation of novels (107). Yet, the commercial aspect of such an endeavor — in other words, its inseparability from the institution that houses it and gives it value — becomes evident with the author’s branding of these spaces as a space to be experienced in a certain way. In this respect, we can see these curated spaces as installations, a singular amalgam of distinctive objects that links that space to the particular events in the novel that lend commercial value. As such an installation, the global city can be understood as the convergence of two opposing forces: 1) the force of global distribution of information that lends a particular city in the mass appeal that attracts a global audience, and 2) a carefully delineated localism that entices the reader with the sense that certain things and not others can happen — become intelligible — there. It might once have been possible to attribute the balancing act that keeps these two forces in equilibrium to the author (e.g., Hemingway’s relation to Kilimanjaro), but in light of today’s publishing industry, one must hold the apparatus of agents, editors, publishers, publicists, reviewers, and marketing and distribution specialists responsible for the novel’s continuing ability to generate both financial capital and cultural capital. Dan Sinykin explains what he calls “the conglomerate era of publishing” as an extensive process (that arguably begins with creative writing programs) that brands certain literary works as sources of capital for the media conglomerates that now own most of the major publishing houses. According to Sinykin, this apparatus ensures that “the contemporary [novel]” can and will be identified with its “attempts to negotiate its complicity with the market” (464-65). To meet the economic aspirations inseparable from mass appeal, a novel must make its presentation of global spaces instantly recognizable and accessible to a broad cross-section of readers–which means that a novel can assert a city’s particular identity only to a point after which the uniformity characterizing all such global spaces will obscure the difference between New York, London, Mumbai, or Istanbul. It requires an act of translation to turn native familiarity into global recognition and, arguably, a reduction or simplification of city space to incorporate it in a differential system of such spaces. To counter the tendency of markets to turn global space into what Jameson calls a “universal generic,” literary city space will demonstrate a curated localism. This “brand” of localism does not resist the uniformity of globalism so much as repackage it for the market. In Sinykin’s words, localism satisfies a particular “reality hunger” for the space—a particular reality that is both immediately recognizable and encountered at a distance (475). This flexibility and the hypermediated relation to any particular city space provides the wiggle room for contemporary novelists to mark certain global spaces as their own.
By describing the postmodern figure of the curator as the “demiurge” of this new kind of art, Jameson implicates the novel in the creation of a new kind of space and in the idea of its ownership and mastery of that space (110). The relationship between the curator and the curated space significantly modifies our understanding of the relationship between the author of the contemporary novel and the global city space that provides its setting for human action. In other words, the author-as-curator is both creating the global city and conveying their sense of ownership over it. Two results follow from this adjustment of the author’s putative role. The first is to replace representation as traditionally understood with this act of curation that creates a distinctive aesthetic space. The reader does not confront the city as a substitute for an actual object or place but as an artifact that exists independently of the city itself. This is not to say that global spaces so textualized cannot be mapped onto the actual spaces whose name and features it shares but rather to insist that the global city we encounter in the contemporary novel is its own singular space with an existence that does not extend beyond the novel in which it is found. Why then must the city in text share a name, features, and other characteristics of an existing physical space outside that text—which is to say, why must this creation be beholden to a certain veracity, a place in the global order itself. If the city as produced by the novel observes a curatorial logic as its author carefully and deliberately chooses bits and pieces to bring together in the space in the text, then why must this conceptual space be dependent on its peculiar relationship to an actual city or place in the material world? City, place, neighborhood names are the quintessentially recognizable features that maintain this relationship, but the need for certain recognizable features is just that—in order for the city to become a commercially viable curated space (a brand) — it must be recognizable in some way. To generate mass appeal, a place in text must bear precise resemblances to the global city that readers recognize as linked to its name.
Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder presents the city of London through a veritable barrage of particular place names, street names, areas, and landmarks immediately familiar to readers already familiar with London—Peckham, Coldharbour Lane, the Piccadilly tube line, Ruskin Park, Vauxhall, Butler’s Wharf, Knightsbridge (near Harrods), Tower Bridge, and Buckingham Palace. As his narrator moves across the city, he often describes his routes in minute detail, from street to tube station to a specific area or an exact location within the city:
It was still rush hour. I didn’t feel like going back into the tube. Instead, I walked down to the river, slowly, through the back streets of Belgravia. When I got there I walked east, crossed Lambeth Bridge, stepped down onto Albert Embankment, found a bench and sat there for a while looking back out across the Thames. (McCarthy 51)
We must ask ourselves whether, were we to attempt to attempt this path through London, would we have enough information to follow the narrator’s movements. Is following this narrator through London all that dissimilar from following Mrs Dalloway on her walks through Virginia Woolf’s London or tracking the movements of James Joyce’s characters across his Dublin. But once we take account that McCarthy’s narrator hires a company of professionals to comb the city’s neighborhoods street by street for the specific building that he has in mind to renovate, we understand that Remainder performs a very different technique of city-mapping. The narrator teams up with Naz, a character with many features of artificial intelligence, to scan small parts of a map of London into the computer, isolate its streets and street-corners, and then have his underlings traverse the actual streets while marking their locations and buildings on a map of the city designed for this purpose along. This extremely close relationship between the tactical experience of the city and its distillation as the strategic map of the city designed to serve the narrator’s needs reinforces the map’s adherence to the material city even as the novel constructs its own space of London for itself.
A similar mapping strategy determines the course of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore as the fifteen-year-old protagonist tries to decide where to flee from his paternal home. In this case, the global city is not bounded by the limits of the city but expands along with the action of the novel from Tokyo, as it turns various sections of Japan into constructed space, as his narrator explains,
Shikoku, I decide. That’s where I’ll go. There’s no particular reason it has to be Shikoku, only that studying the map I got the feeling that’s where I should head. The more I look at the map — actually every time I study it — the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me. It’s a long way south of Tokyo, separated from the mainland by water, with a warm climate. (Murakami 10)
While the plot takes the reader through places in time, both imagined and presumably real, the action takes place in physical locations that could, one assumes, be traced on a standard map of Japan. In this, the protagonist’s flight, and in the later road trip that Mr Hoshino and Nakata undertake, routes, bridges, and towns on the way are described with the same level of detail as that of the London that McCarthy’s narrator systematically traverses.
Specificity and exacting detail thus seem key to their novels’ representation of the global city —an intensely local confrontation, an extremely well-marked urban space. Yet, there is a point beyond which specificity, in fact, serves to efface the markers that particularize these urban spaces. McCarthy’s narrator meets his friend Catherine at a pub named Dogstar; he meets Naz for the first time at Blueprint Café; he takes a homeless man to a Greek restaurant by the Thames; on the corner where Frith Street cuts across Old Compton Street, he visits a “Seattle-themed coffee shop” (McCarthy 52). The question then arises, do these named places actually exist (there’s nothing in their naming that suggests they do) and exist in the precise locations mentioned in the text? In other words, is there a pub named Dogstar in Brixton or a Starbucks on the corner of Frith and Compton? In the contemporary age of technology, is it not difficult to determine the answers to these questions but no matter what the answer, the argument is twofold? First, it does not matter whether the pub or café is real because such localisms are curated to feel they are — because McCarthy has arranged certain minutiae of London to lend those locations a veracity independent of whether it actually exists or not, and second, he has selected places — a Greek restaurant in a Northern European country, an international coffee shop, a crowded pub on a weekend night — that transform London’s local spaces into a recognizable urban space, the known trappings of a global city.
Murakami’s novel features two distinct forms of such effacement. The first, much like in Remainder, is to remove the distinctive mark of local features even while maintaining a sufficient level of specificity to make that space recognizable to most readers — a highway rest area, a bus that traverses across cities and towns, a “typical business hotel,” the YMCA, even the Komura Memorial Library, a privately owned library that is turned into a public space through the donations of its former owners. Once again, here is an act of generalization, a stripping away of specificity in order to make the infrastructure of the novel accessible to all. In fact, during their break at a highway rest stop, Sakura underscores this uniformity to Kafka — the instant recognizability of these kinds of spaces: “’What does it matter what it’s called?’” she continues. ‘You’ve got your toilets and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches’” (Murakami 22). On Murakami’s website, the novel’s English translator responds to a question about how Japan has been depicted in the novel by indicating that “the sterile anonymity of highways and roadside rest areas” in Murakami’s novels is indeed a realistic depiction of “civilization.” The second instance is relatively minor, but the function of this detail provides a framework within which to question the act of effacing the local specificity of a location. In the US Army Intelligence Reports at the beginning of the novel, the location where children were mysteriously rendered unconscious occurs is presented as “[deleted] town, [deleted] county,” in this way indicating what has been redacted as classified information from official documents that are being made available to the public. Sakura’s question, “What does it matter what it’s called?” resounds here, as the novel asks us to imagine the process of “unmarking” local spaces. The specificities that would localize the urban space of the novel is [deleted] city in order that it can be globally circulated.
How does the reader confront such conceptual space, a “bizarre object,” as Jameson calls it? (108) To put it another way, what kind of reader do these spaces (and their novels) address? To put it another way, what kind of reader will recognize these known trappings of a global city? The sufficiently localized and globalized space requires a reader with a certain form of cultural competence — one that can identify local markers in a global space, even if that identification occurs at a curated distance. One way to look at these spaces is to see their curation as a universalization process — a conscious distillation, on the part of the author in collaboration with the publishing apparatus — of a city into places with inhabitants that any city-dweller will recognize. In such a case, branding the urban space involves a knowing wink to its reader — a sense of being in on the local reference (e.g., the “Seattle-themed coffee shop”). Or perhaps it would be more productive to ask what forms of cultural competence that readers of global novels might not need, because the global space’s localism has already been translated into a reference accessible to the “global” reader. Just such a translation can be seen in McCarthy’s decision not to name the local Greek restaurant in London (had he done so, only people intimately familiar with London would know the restaurant and the national cuisine it features) and instead maintain a level of anonymity that does not alienate those who are encountering the city of London at a distance. Thus, in a space that is being understood as an installation — as a coming together of fragments, a collage in time — the reader perhaps establishes coherence through this push-and-pull relation of local and global, a process of tracing patterns through the decipherable markers of the global space presented at a cognitive distance.
For Murakami, however, there seems to be a contradiction in his approaches because, on the one hand, he writes on his website that “in a novel, if the story is appealing, it doesn’t matter much if you don’t catch all the detail. I’m not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.” Here, he demonstrates an unwillingness to engage the distinction between Japanese references and those that are clearly American or European. At the same time, the website itself is part of Murakami’s curated literary brand and contains, for Kafka, an archive of resources to complement and, effectively, decode parts of the book. This archive contains images of Japanese food (eel) or magazines (Taiyo) or less familiar Japanese writers (Soseki) mentioned in the book and an entire playlist created by Murakami for the many references to specific songs and musicians in the novel. Thus, despite his confidence that readers will be able to engage with his novel with a sanguinity that rejects questions of complete understanding or its lack, here is an effort to translate his novel’s constellation of objects, people, names, and things into a more accessible space. Here, readers encounter a curated space that brings together the specificity of place through references to Japanese neighborhoods or city infrastructure (like trains) or recognizable food — charmingly specific and yet not alienatingly so … and intensely commercial.
When Jameson uses “demiurge” to characterize the curator of these spaces, the implication is that the author who has curated this city has left his brand on it, implying that one contemporary novelist’s London is not the same London as another novelist’s. To turn that phrase around, we might say that the global space created in (and belonging to) a novel is specific to its author and becomes their particular brand, a trademark or personal cityscape. Jameson senses something sinister in this move inasmuch as every element of the collection of things and people is subsumed under the institution, of which the curator becomes an embodiment, “its allegorical personification” (110). By the same token, however, one could argue that the curious particularity of the city that becomes a novelist’s brand comes to embody the curator, or novelist-surrogate who curates the space within the novel, not the other way around. That the city space in a novel can take the place of the actual city in the global imagination of the readership, depends on whether or not that space assumes the status of the novelist’s signature. This was of course true of Balzac’s Paris, Dickens’s London, or Joyce’s Dublin, but the forces of globalization, including the global marketing of novels, has accelerated the process of displacement, by which cities turn the tables on their authors and assume their identity.
McCarthy’s Remainder provides an excellent example of this phenomenon: the recurring cab office near the phone box, from which the narrator first calls his lawyer and around which his third re-enactment (the first of the shootings) takes place. In the first instance, McCarthy describes “the caged façade of a cab office just beside the phone box. Movement Cars, it said; Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance” (McCarthy 10). The narrator wonders what Light on its own could mean but shortly after realizes that he had misread the sign — there was no comma between Light and Removals. It read: Light Removals. Nearly a section of the novel later, the narrator returns to that area for a re-enactment and once again, the novel tells us that the sign of the cab office said: Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance. Undoubtedly, in the spaces that the narrator has constructed for his particular re-enactment needs, one expects to see his curatorial mind establish gaps that assign spaces to various events. This cab office with its painted sign is part of the city of London, the setting for the events that transform city space into something like an objectified version of what might have been his personal memory — and even then, despite the trance state that takes hold when the narrator embarks on another re-enactment , he marks another section of London the city as his own. So imbedded is the narrator’s repurposed city space in the actual spaces of London that one cannot be surprised to find the sign reappearing once again with the mistakenly added comma. Finally, when that street on his way back to his apartment obstruct his path and demand a re-enactment of a street shooting, the narrator again rereads the sign: “It was Light Removals, not Light then Removals: I knew that already, but had just forgotten that I knew” (211). The novel itself seems to “forget” with the narrator and remembers the mistake only when he does. In this respect, the city behaves as an extension of the narrator-protagonist.
The city has a sense of familiarity that seems virtually independent of London itself, which seems to provide the setting and inspiration for staging the events of the story. Made up of the kind of detail that combines specificity with anonymity, the various spaces McCarthy carves out of London in the events composing the plot could as well exist anywhere in the world. Their singularity depends not on the particularity of such spaces but on their relationship to the narrator and his effort to create a personal memory from scratch out of the materials at hand:
The intersection by the telephone box from which I’d phoned Marc Daubenay came and went on the periphery of my attention … then it was the tyre shop and café where the men had watched me as a I’d jerked back and forth on the same spot in the street after setting out to meet Catherine; then, before the ex-siege zone, the street that ran parallel to the street perpendicular to mine. Then I was home. (71)
Nothing specific to London marks the pitstops in his route through a backstreet in the section of London called Brixton, nothing specific to Brixton’s Afro-Caribbean heritage. Together with minute details that make these various sites at once absolutely singular and absolutely generic, the repetition of “I” reinforces our sense that this is his space to buy up, inhabit and renovate with his own sense of what the past might feel like if he could actually remember it. We might indeed see this as a dramatization of Murakami’s description of how he comes up with the setting for his novels, again from the mini-archive in Kafka on his website: “When I write a novel,” he writes on the site, “I put into play all the information inside me.” As a globally renowned novelist and a translator himself, Murakami undoubtedly knows enough of a “global culture” of references he can tap into and is savvy enough to balance Japan’s particularity with Western references. This translates into a branded Japan, which combines recognizable Japanese dishes like udon, sake, tofu, sushi, and chicken cutlet with Beethoven, Duke Ellington, and Hoover vacuum cleaners. So, too, we find the myths of Oedipus and Franz Kafka himself sharing space with a contemporary Japanese sports team like Chunichi Dragons and the poetic forms of tanka and haiku. The novel mentions specific places as Ichikawa and Hokkaido on its cognitive map along with such concepts as “city wards” and “prefectures” that are generically urban. At the Komura Memorial Library, Murakami’s protagonist reads The Arabian Nights, a bildungsroman by Japanese writer named Soseki, and a biography of Napoleon, establishing the library as a microcosm of the localized global space of his Murakami’s curated Japan.
