Modernité en transit - Modernity in Transit

7: Exploring Post/Modern Urban Space: Homelessness and American Literature

7 Exploring Post/ Modern Urban Space: Homelessness and American Literature Dorothea Löbbermann Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany Introduction E ver since the 1980s, the problem of urban homelessness has occupied not only activists and social critics, but also the cultural imagination, reviving, in a way, a topic that has been prevalent in North American literature since the 19th century (on the history of homelessness in 19th - and early 20th -century American literature and culture, see Giamo, 1989; Kusmer, 2001; Allen, 2004). In recent literature, homeless characters have started to move from the margin to the centre of urban representation (see for instance, the work of Paul Auster [Moon Palace, 1989; In the Country of Last Things, 1987], Samuel R. Delany [The Mad Man, 1984; Bread and Wine, 1999], George Dawes Green [The Caveman’s Valentine, 1994], Sarah Schulman [People in Trouble, 1990; Rat Bohemia, 1995], Robert Majzels [City of Forgetting, 1997], T. C. Boyle [The Tortilla Curtain, 1995] and the authors discussed here: Jennifer Toth [The Mole People, 1993], Colum McCann [This Side of Brightness, 1998] and Exploring Post/Modern Urban Space 203 204 Dorothea Löbbermann Karen Tei Yamashita [Tropic of Orange, 1997]).1 At the same time that a growing number of texts identifies homelessness as one of the major problems of American cities, it also (re)constitutes homelessness as a sign of modern and postmodern urbanity, as if they were taking their cue from Lukács’s notion of the “transcendental homelessness” of modernity that finds expression in the form of the novel (1971). The relationship of homelessness and urban space is one of exclusion, characterized by issues such as eviction, displacement and placelessness. Even new sites that appear in the city—benches, on which it is impossible to lie down, and other so-called anti-homeless devices, or new shelters—bear evidence of exclusion. This situation forces the homeless into in-between places, be it in temporary sidewalk dwellings, or subway tunnels or day centres that are hidden from plain sight and from which they are bused to night-shelters and back. The homeless, then, lead us to interstices of urban space. From the position of these interstices, they have, in various ways, become symbols for the divided economies of the city. Like Kawash (1998), I hesitate to embrace the idea of the homeless people’s subversiveness in the appropriation of urban space that some critics tend to overemphasize: the violence against homeless bodies does outweigh strategies of homeless placemaking . However, it is also important to see that there are ways in which the homeless interrupt the seeming immanence of postmodern urban space. This is precisely because homelessness takes place at the crossroads of the material (where homelessness is characterized by violence and “lack”), the social (from which the homeless are excluded), and the symbolic, where the homeless have received a central position, be it in novels from Paul Auster to Sara Paretsky, or in sociology, where MacCannell (1992) writes that “the homeless are the soul of postmodernity, if it can be said to have a true soul” (p. 111). MacCannell (1992) identifies the symbolic power of the homeless with their signalization of lack: “[in their shopping carts, the homeless] are actually carrying heavy ideological responsibilities within the postmodern setup. 205 Exploring Post/Modern Urban Space In the postmodern community … ‘as a whole’, they represent lack. It is precisely this lack, this lack of a ‘home’, which is generic to postmodernity” (p. 111). The lack he refers to is both material and ideal. The material lack of a house or an apartment is linked to the ideal lack of a “home” as a place that ensures identity and community.2 According to MacCannell, the position of “lack” enables the homeless to interrupt the apparent immanence of postmodern society , which pretends to be classless and undifferentiated. It endows the homeless with a symbolic power that stems to a great extend from their social exclusion and their status as Other, much like women have been “Othered” and simultaneously elevated to symbols in patriarchy. Through figurations of homelessness, then, the city is experienced from the perspective of “lack”. It is in this sense that the focus on homelessness presents a significant contribution to the analysis of postmodern urban literature. In contrast to the realist and modernist urban novel, postmodern fiction has explored the heterogeneity, unreadability and disparateness of the city to a degree that the city...