Arcadia is not written to eulogize Victor’s achievement. Taking the incident that the Soap Market is going to be replaced by the giant shopping mall Arcadia as a crucial
C. From the Countryside to the City
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“[is] becoming his backyard” (214). He does what he scarcely did when working for Victor: wandering in the Soap Market at night. He sees homeless people who gather in the marketplace, sitting or sleeping around a fire that sheds “the fantasy of home”
(216). It leads him to the market’s edge adjacent to the house he lived when young.
Rook is forced to abandon the unconscious, repetitive mode of life, and now his steps appear in the area of urban poor which situationists regard as assets to the city rather than spaces to be removed by rational urban planning. After Rook changes his living in the city, his concept of urban spaces is different and his relationship with the city is also remade. He realizes that this city does not belong to “invulnerables,” which means those wealthy people who are well-protected from all dangers in the city, and he is also convinced that it is the community of city people that supports the life of the city but not the capitalist functionalism.
C. From the Countryside to the City
From Burgher’s textual flânerie which focuses on describing characters’
walking in the city readers can perceive that he reveals the fractures and incoherence of socially produced space. In Arcadia, we can notice that urban geography and atmosphere make a great impact upon country people. After moving into the city, Aunt and Em encounter cultural shock that strains their living, but they still figure out the way to survive and claim their spaces in the city. From their inner world we can notice that the country psychology meets the urban geography, which provides us another way to rethink the city. Through Aunt and Em, who are neither familiar with urban life style nor cultivated by bourgeois ideology, Crace presents other
possibilities to use urban spaces and thus suggests a critical understanding of urban people’s thinking. Besides, these two characters show that individual reaction to environmental influence differs from person to person, and such difference is caused
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by dissimilar mentalities that control the shaping of the city in the mind. Moreover, the subjective reaction to the objective environment will keep influencing
psychological forming of the city. Therefore, psychogeography provides a way to analyze various interpretations of the city according to different psychologies.
Marketplace represents the convergence of all kinds of people and things, and it exists as a small-scale society. “Situationists regarded the best urban activity as human, unmechanized, and nonalienating, and their texts, films, and maps indicated some possibilities, variously idealizing the marketplaces . . . ” (Sadler 92). In Arcadia, the Soap Market is not only the centerpiece of a commercial city but also the place where people frequently communicate with each other and form a community. The traders are conversant with each other and know the produce very well, and
customers here not only trade but also make relationships. Moreover, this vegetable and fruit market is also taken as a link between the country and the city since its odors and the way how people interact with each other reminds country people of the
atmosphere of the countryside. However, Victor and his architect Busi see the Soap Market as the epitome of urban anarchy which must be taken under control.
Estimated with the standard of functionalism and rationality, the Soap Market is regarded as inefficient, backward, and chaotic, but it actually shows a vigorous life and urban diversity which could hardly be found in the homogeneous Big Vic or Arcadia.
Taking a close look at how Em and Aunt live in the city, we can notice two completely different moods. For Em, the city is far from the heaven she has originally imagined. Both the urban traffic and buildings scare her, and indifferent city people make her feel helpless and alienated. She encounters a hypocritical yardman who less offers helps to her than attempts to take advantage of her. The city goes beyond Em’s
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imagination: she is overwhelmed by the cultural shock and fearful of unexpected dangers. Therefore, she reacts to the city by rejecting it and escaping into the nostalgic memories of an idealized village life without material problems. The
shoppers, farm produce, and the community created by market-people make the Soap Market the extension of the countryside for Em. “She felt at ease and safe amongst the country products and the smells,” and “[s]he knew that this was where her fortune would be made” (Crace 91). Thus, she fixes herself in the marketplace and begs from the shoppers. “She traded smiles and peace of mind. She did it well. She had a baby to support” (93). She acts like “Modonna and her Child” as “a living sculpture labeled Motherhood” (95, 96). Creating a particular atmosphere, Em remakes the space and affects one’s mood. It is proved that “smiles and peace of mind” are more accepted by those passersby. People’s responses reflect their attitude toward the misfortune: “We in this city are the sentimental sort. We don’t like tragedy” (94). Em, like a trader, has her pitch and trades peaceful atmosphere in the bustle of marketplace. It is the way how Em interacts with the city: distancing herself from others and performing to survive. As a stranger in the city, Em tries to establish her identity through
conforming to the values of city people. Burgher’s narration of Em reveals the hidden atmosphere that is out of the functional meaning of a place but exists as a “therapy”
for a “sentimental” urban mind.
The city Aunt feels is totally different from that in Em’s mind. While Em tells her sister Aunt how the city has beaten her, Aunt, contrarily thinking city as “better than a friend,” replies that the city “took more care of waifs and strays than any village in the land” and it is “city air” that “makes free” (Crace 111). The streets are repellent to Em, but Aunt loves strolling in the streets and unexpected encounters.
The city is like a prison that confines Em, who comforts herself with the refurbished
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memories of the countryside and desires to go back to her village, while Aunt takes the city as “a place for play” that endows her freedom (104). At first, she works as a rich man’s maid, but as “a squally girl” who is not “the curtsy-kowtow kind and has no kitchen skill,” her master’s hope to quickly and cheaply transform her “from hayseed into scullion” is hardly possible (104). To accept the etiquette which the bourgeois women conform to is to oppress her natural disposition: “Aunt simply could not understand the odd proprieties, the niceties, of bourgeois city life where more was wasted than consumed, where laughter, yawns, and stomach wind shared equal status, swallowed, hidden, stifled by a hand” (105). Her employer’s cook calls her “leaking pot” and scolds that “[y]ou country girls are all the same … ‘Bumpkins do not good burghers make’” (104,105). From the view of city people like the cook, Aunt’s look and behaviors indicate that this girl is crude and underbred. However, Aunt grows up in the countryside where there is no exquisite life attitude. What city people call dirty and crude does not matter to her. To some degree, it is the urban hegemony behind the attempt to cultivate Aunt that regards her as vulgar and devoid of any merit. Therefore, we can notice the cultural conflicts between the country and the city from Aunt’s interaction with urban people and that under the surface of the ordered routs and patterns there are struggles and discrepancy going on.
This country girl will not be recruited by the regular urban life style, and she creates her own way to use urban spaces:
So she did well on city streets. She begged and importuned enough to count herself–by country standards–well set up…She liked to place her hat upon her head and wander streets as if they were country lanes and she was simply searching for free fruit. She never tired of putting out her hand or challenging–this was her favourite trick–the drinking men in bars to toss
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and land a coin in the canyon brim of her straw hat. (Crace 108) The playful walking in the streets makes her see the cultural difference between bourgeois women and herself, but it allows her to avoid the cultural hegemony and not to take the oppressive transformation from “country bumpkin” to “civil burgher.”
She strolls in the streets and makes money by playing tricks with men as if the streets are country lanes and she is harvesting not begging. Aunt, walking in the city,
projects the imagined countryside to the cityscape and negotiates in the mixture of urban and rural culture. Burgher’s description of Em and Aunt shows that the
marginal ones interact with the city in their own ways by taking spatial practices, and Burgher’s dérive that follows the experiences of the inferior intends to subvert the central power represented by capitalism and bourgeois culture through depicting spatial practices taken by the powerless. “The ‘soft’ mutable elements of the city scene” such as “the play of presence and absence . . . even of time, and the
association of ideas” are what situationists care about when constituting the unities of ambience (Sadler 70). Em, whose experiences show the indifferent and dangerous aspect of the city, escapes from the city and hides into the embellished memories of the countryside. Aunt, who is shrewd and coltish, plays with the past experience and the present situation, the imagined and the real, and creates another possibility to use urban spaces. Situationists’ investigation of the city aims at revealing the difference, and even the conflict in social geography. The Soap Market represents the diversity of the city, and it is feasible to find spatial possibilities and struggles that administrative domination keeps removing but fails to do so.
Ⅳ. Conclusion
The establishment of Arcadia symbolizes the attempt to homogenize urban spaces. This world excludes conflicts that actually exist in the society which is under
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the domination of capitalism. Arcadia evicts casual workers and the homeless, and then segregates urban spaces along class lines. It is closed off unconformable traders and any democratic participation. Therefore, such homogenization itself produces contradictions and conflicts. By means of dérive which is not routed by functionalism but let by the attraction or repellence of spaces, psychogeography presents the city with fragmented zones of ambiences which imply the real violence involved in constructing homogeneous urban spaces. The dérive is based on the street-level perspective of the city which is opposed to the bird-eye view. The latter represents the order imposed upon the city and the power to define the meaning of urban spaces, and the former symbolizes the remapping that cuts the abstract surface of order and
homogeneity so as to let the heterogeneity emerge. Contrary to Victor who views his city with a “solar, totalizing eye” high on the top of Big Vic and wants to “make the complexity of the city readable,” Burgher walks “down below” and fragmentizes such apparently coherent map with difference and conflicts (de Certeau 92, 93). His textual flânerie could be taken as the remapping of the city which presents different
characters’ spatial practices and refuses the mechanistic functioning of urban space as well as the capitalist ambition to determine the meaning of urban space. However, the formation of Soap Two reveals that urban space is in process and incomplete. It eludes final determination but evolves with city people, and I will analyze the organism formed by urban space and its inhabitants in the next chapter.