Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics

1. Introduction

1 Chapter One Introduction Ruins shape modern urban landscapes. They are both the effects of the real and the remains of the past.1 Skyscrapers, with their shiny, clean, complete look characterize the modern city. But decisive historical events constantly disrupt that “finished” scenario, interrupting people’s daily routines—frustrating their fantasies of tranquility and continuity. Modern poetry on ruins performs an awakening call to the lurking “real,” to the violence of history in the making. On September 11, 2001, a few months before I began this work, the world witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the ruins of the Twin Towers. The twenty-first century had opened with the destruction of the symbols of globalized capitalist culture. Modernity was suddenly a vulnerable project, a finitude anticipated by postmodern architects. Suddenly ruins once again surpassed the poetic topos—they were palpable, immediate , threatening visions of reality. But what are the differences between reading about ruins and seeing them? How do representations of ruins determine our ways of reading reality and making history? What was the difference between being a victim, witnessing the events in New York, and obsessively watching and “living” those events as they took place on our television screens? TV viewers were placed in “virtual reality”; it seemed too real to be true. It was a catastrophe of Hollywood-like dimensions in the center of New York City, the epitome of the modern city and the capital of the global world. All the images of the World Trade Center that followed showed that the American flag conquered those ruins; while reclaiming them as theirs, the flags were also a symbol of “national unity” and “victory” that penetrated the destruction 2 Chapter One and the “defeat” caused by the crumbled buildings. The attacks served to strengthen American nationalism and reinforce the military resolve to invade Afghanistan. It empowered Americans and the Bush administration, while it revealed the bleak side of the politics of fear. However, the media coverage showed no bodies, no blood; it was a sanitized face of destruction. Slavoj Žižek comments on the coverage of the event: …the “derealization” of the horror went on after the WTC collapse: while the number of victims—3,000—is repeated all the time, it is surprising the actual carnage we see— no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people… in clear contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail… (Welcome 13) Monuments to the victims of September 11 memorialize their names, but the rubble became a massive site of destruction, grey and opaque. Soon the ruins of the World Trade Center were one of the most visited tourist sites in New York City. Žižek goes on to associate the catastrophe with the moment in which the protagonists of the Hollywood production The Matrix (1999) see the ruins of Chicago after a global war and awaken to historical reality, to “the desert of the real.” The “derealization” of the destruction of September 11 made “reality” or “the desert of the real” easier to digest. Nonetheless, the traumatic experience of witnessing NewYork in ruins provoked a collective historical awakening. On March 11, 2004, only three days before Spain’s general elections, the “effects of the real” were also felt in Europe with the attacks on Madrid’s trains, an event that confirmed the powerful political effects of ruins and devastation on everyday life in the modern collective psyche. The way the trains in ruins were represented and information was manipulated proved crucial to the people’s political response in the ensuing elections. A majority of the Spanish people felt betrayed by the manipulation of the event by the right-wing government, who initially blamed the Basque nationalist terrorist group ETA although much of the evidence pointed to Islamic terrorism as payback for Spain’s support of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The Spanish 3 Introduction people decisively voted in favor of opposition candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the leader of the Socialist Party. Like the media coverage concentrating on the monumental dimensions of the catastrophe in New York in 2001, many modern poems on ruins omit the remains of the dead and the bloody traces of war. However, there are other texts that, like the dreadful images that emerged from Madrid in 2004, disturb their readers; their portrayals...