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  • Remembrance of Things Imagined:Urban Development and the Fictions of Memory
  • Thomas Heise (bio)
Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. Mark Storey. Oxford UP, 2013.
The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. Eric Avila. U of Minnesota P, 2014.

In his profoundly pessimistic meditation on unhappiness, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud contemplates an “astonishing” contention, the notion “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions” (33). In this moment, Freud is astonished not by the classic polarity between the ugly realities of the modern urbanized society in which we live and the idyllic fantasy of a presocial state of being in nature to which we can never return. Rather, his thought pauses over the more complex, dialectical problem that no matter how “we may define civilization,” we constantly search for ways “to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering [that] are a part of that very civilization” (33). Thus, Freud presents us with the seemingly irresolvable and agonizing paradox that we turn to the extraordinary “scientific and technical advances” of modern life to safeguard us from the problems that modern life itself has created; in doing so, we produce new forms of disappointment, loss, and anxiety (35). “[T]he economics of our happiness,” he says in an evocative phrase, is intricately bound up with the affective dimension of technology—the feelings arising from a “newly-won power over space and time” and the “subjugation of the forces of nature”—modern advances that despite their liberating potential has left “the last few generations” at the end of a losing proposition in which they find no increase in the “amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they might expect from life” (34, 35).

The advances over space, time, and nature that Freud singles out at the end of the 1920s are tethered to the technologies of [End Page 210] capitalist urbanization, namely the technologies of mobility and communication, whose power to radically transform our concepts of memory, community, and identity has only become more pronounced with time. “[T]he extension of human habitats, the dispersal of places across space, the opportunities to escape certain locales and to form new socialities, and the fragmentation of temporal flows,” these are, the sociologists Mimi Sheller and John Urry argue, only a few of the centrifugal effects of modernization, which combined with the temporal compression of geography have made individual, familial, and community life feel reduced and attenuated (207). As Freud contemplates the potential conveniences—flexibility and independence—afforded by a “newly-won power over space and time,” he asks why there is “no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed?” (34, 35). Freud does not answer his own question but instead inverts the problem. “If there had been no railway to conquer distances,” he acknowledges, “my child would never have left town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him” (35). The train (or the plane or the automobile, or the ocean liner for that matter) can reunite the father with the child who it has taken away, but not without cost. A reunion is never the same as a union. At stake here in the expanded freedom of mobility and the unbundling of those territories of life—home, work, and leisure—that “have historically been closely integrated” is the weakening of the bonds of family, friendship, geography, and tradition (Sheller and Urry 208). Or as Andreas Huyssen reflects on the explosion of memory discourses in the age of globalization, it is the...

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