ISSUE 28 1/2020 - An electronic journal published by The University of Bialystok - Crossroads - A Journal of English Studies
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ISSUE 28
1/2020
An electronic journal published
by The University of BialystokCROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
ISSUE 28
1/2020
An electronic journal published by The University of Bialystok........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Publisher:
The University of Białystok
The Faculty of Philology
ul. Liniarskiego 3
15-420 Białystok, Poland
tel. 0048 85 7457516
crossroads@uwb.edu.pl
www.crossroads.uwb.edu.pl
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
e-ISSN 2300-6250
The electronic version of Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies is its primary (referential) version.
Editor-in-chief:
Agata Rozumko
Literary editor:
Grzegorz Moroz
Review editor:
Daniel Karczewski
Editorial assistant:
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk
Language editors:
Peter Foulds, Kirk Palmer
Advisory board:
Pirjo Ahokas (University of Turku), Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich (SWPS: University of Social Sciences
and Humanities), Ali Almanna (Sohar University), Elżbieta Awramiuk (University of Białystok),
Isabella Buniyatova (Borys Ginchenko Kyiev University), Xinren Chen (Nanjing University),
Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch (University of Southern California), Zinaida Charytończyk
(Minsk State Linguistic University), Gasparyan Gayane (Yerevan State Linguistic University “Bryusov”),
Marek Gołębiowski (University of Warsaw), Anne-Line Graedler (Hedmark University College),
Cristiano Furiassi (Università degli Studi di Torino), Jarosław Krajka (Maria Curie-Skłodowska
University / University of Social Sciences and Humanities), Marcin Krygier (Adam Mickiewicz
University), A. Robert Lee (Nihon University), Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld (Jagiellonian University),
Zbigniew Maszewski (University of Łódź), Michael W. Thomas (The Open University, UK), Sanae
Tokizane (Chiba University), Peter Unseth (Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas),
Daniela Francesca Virdis (University of Cagliari), Valentyna Yakuba (Borys Ginchenko Kyiev University)
2CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Special issue
CITY / NON-CITY
Guest editors:
Jerzy Kamionowski
Anna Maria Karczewska........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Contents
5 JERZY KAMIONOWSKI, ANNA MARIA KARCZEWSKA
CITY / NON-CITY: A PREFACE
8 DOROTA GUZOWSKA
The London human zoo in Mark Mason’s Walk the Lines.
The London Underground, Overground
21 JULIA KULA
Lost in space, lost in himself: Paul Auster’s Ghosts
and the postmodern city
37 MAGDALENA ŁAPIŃSKA
Illusionary safe havens: The role of the city and the country in
Zelda Lockhart’s Fifth Born and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle
52 KLARA MEDNIS
The habitat of crime – Random Acts of Senseless Violence
from the criminological perspective
67 JAN MORYŃ
The airstream futuropolis: Hauntological reading of Gibson’s
“The Gernsback Continuum”
79 MARK TARDI
Heliopolis: Lisa Jarnot’s rewriting of a legendary city
4........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
CITY / NON-CITY:
A PREFACE
Acroyd’s London, Dreiser’s Chicago, Dos Passos’s New York, Joyce’s Dublin, Pynchon’s
Los Angeles, T. S. Eliot’s Unreal City… This random list provides merely a handful of
examples that come to the reader’s mind when we think of the city as a setting for action
or as a space for the peregrinations of a sensitive mind, and of how this setting is repre-
sented in works of literature in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, it suggests a division
of the literary-urban space into two basic categories – i.e., the historical/actual and the
imaginary/symbolic.
This contrast between these two kinds of cities can be taken together with the strat-
egies of representation. On the one hand there is objectivity, based on the acute-and-
synthesizing observations of the omniscient narrator(s), which turns into a careful
description. On the other pole of the spectrum is situated a radical subjectivity mani-
festing itself in interior monologue and similar Modernist techniques that demonstrate
the workings of individual consciousness. The extension of the latter is the postmodern
approach, in which the presented world is generated by the human mind or created
by language itself (a “virus from outer space”, to use William S. Burroughs’ metaphor),
rather than reflected in the former or reproduced through the latter. Such juxtapositions
may be produced ad infinitum: the realistic versus the fantastic, the historical versus
the imaginary, the material versus the impressionistic, showing versus telling. Still, it
is quite possible to challenge such easy-way-out options and look at the urban space as a
hybrid, realistic-cum-fantastic organism with potential / in the process of a permanent
metamorphosis: from the perfectly designed labyrinth (albeit possibly without a center)
to amorphism and chaos embodied in its “nature”, from a historical city to metaphor,
from an urban scene as a disciplined totality to fragmentariness and incompleteness of
individual perceptions. This is the case since, as Robert E. Park says:
[T]he city and the urban environment represent [humanity’s] most consistent and, on the
whole, [its] most successful attempt to remake the world [it] lives in more after [its] heart’s
desire. But if the city is the world which [humans] created, it is the world in which [they are]
henceforth condemned to live.
Thus the city as a natural environment for humans has its inhabitants, characters
who merge with the urban landscape following their vital pursuits and their desires for
5........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
social recognition and success whose trappings may be – roughly speaking – affluence,
fame, and sex; or, as it happens, trying to satisfy some morbid pleasures – committing
crimes or demonstrating other kinds of anti-social behavior. This may be regarded as a
constant in the history of the city in literature – as Kevin R. McNamara observes, there
are “social, economic, and cultural continuities between ancient, early modern, and
contemporary cities.”
And, perhaps it is the reason why the city is a topos which has been present in litera-
ture ever since. In fact, it is as old a literary motif as literature itself. Think of Gilgamesh
where “the wall of Uruk-Heaven” was built, Homer’s Iliad and the siege of Troy, Virgil’s
establishing of Rome in the Aeneid, and also, to focus on the epics of later cultural
periods, of Heorot in Beowulf , of Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and of Joyce’s Ulysses,
the latter quite rightly classified by Patrick Parrinder as a “work of absolute realism”, in
which the Mediterranean Sea from the Odyssey undergoes a city-change to become the
modern Dublin. What all these narratives have in common is that they establish a polis,
whereas outside the non-human, hybrid – i.e., deformed and corrupt – monsters live:
the “fatherless creatures”, the Cyclops, Lucifer, the Sirens.
*
The six articles in this special issue of “Crossroads” are on works published in the
late 20th / early 21st centuries. To give justice to fluidity of the contemporary literary
phenomena, the articles are arranged alphabetically - in the order dictated by the
names of the authors. The issue opens with a “negotiated reading” of Mark Mason’s Walk
the Lines. The London Underground, Overground, in which Dorota Guzowska focuses on
London as a human zoo, and draws parallels between this metaphor and ethnic exhibi-
tions popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Julia Kula follows with a discussion
on postmodern New York in Paul Auster’s Ghosts to demonstrate how the dominating
chronotope affects the investigation, which results in a typically postmodern anti-detec-
tive novel. Magdalena Łapińska explores emotional geographies of Zelda Lockhart’s
duology (Fifth Born and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle) set in New York, St. Louis
and rural Mississippi, and explores a variety of expressions of (mostly) sexual violence
within a black community. The theme of crime is overtly discussed in the article on Jack
Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Drawing on the ecological school of crimi-
nology, Klara Mednis demonstrates a strict connection that exists between social disor-
ganization and the high risk of brutal crime in the novel. Jan Moryń employs Derrida’s
concept of hauntology for the purpose of reading the gap that exists between life in the
present moment and dreams of the bright future in William Gibson’s “The Gernsback
Continuum,” a short story set in 1930s in the cities of the American Southwest. The
last article in the issue is a reading of Lisa Jarnot’s poetic sequence entitled Heliopolis;
6........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
here the mythical Sun City becomes a scene of bizarre human actions performed by
animals. Mark Tardi examines the ethical and social implications of the poet’s vision,
also demonstrating how her stylistic strategies challenge the concept of spatio-tempo-
ral boundaries.
The city gates are open. Welcome home.
Jerzy Kamionowski
Anna Maria Karczewska
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DOROTA GUZOWSKA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2020.28.1.01
University of Białystok
ORCID: 0000-0001-8683-8215
The London human
zoo in Mark Mason’s
Walk the Lines. The
London Underground,
Overground
Abstract. Mark Mason’s book about London documents the author’s urban odyssey – his ten London
walks undertaken with the aim of finding the capital’s soul. The narrative key to Mason’s description of
London is geographical space. He walked the entire length of the Tube – overground, finding the short-
est routes between each station. My paper is a proposition of negotiated reading of this journey. Instead
of following the author to the sights along his walking routes, I focus my attention on his chance meet-
ings with the people of London. Mason defines London as “the best human zoo”. I explore conceptual
similarities between his metaphorical human zoo and real-life 19th and 20th-century ethnic exhibitions.
Keywords: human zoo, walker, the Tube, Mark Mason, metaphor.
Two factors have affected the choice of this topic. One was the 60th anniversary of the
opening of the last European human zoo in Brussels, covered widely in the media in
April 2018. The other was my son’s fascination with the London underground, which
prompted my choice of springtime reading that year. In an attempt to help myself
communicate with a much-too-often monosyllabic teenager, I purchased Mark Mason’s
book advertised as a story about London and the Tube. Mark Mason is a journal-
ist and writer and a walking tour guide in London. For a few pounds anyone can join
him on a walk following a section of a selected Tube line at street level. He has also
authored a number of books about Britain, which are a mix of trivia, anecdote and over-
heard conversation (Mason 2013a, 2015, 2017). Walk the Lines. The London Underground,
Overground is a documentation of Mason’s urban odyssey – his ten London walks under-
taken with the aim of “finding the capital’s soul” (Mason 2013b: 10). Anxious not to write
1 Address for correspondence: Faculty of Philology, University of Białystok, Plac NZS 1, 15-403 Białystok,
Poland. E-mail: guzowska@uwb.edu.pl
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just another guide to London, he sought a framework to make sense of the city and
found such a framework below street level. Being a keen walker, he traversed the entire
length of the Tube – overground, finding the shortest routes between all 269 stations2.
The project totalled 403.2 miles, 174 hours and 50 minutes over the period between June
and December 2010. Observations made by the author along the way create an intri-
cate portrait of London. He walks from station to station, but it is the world between
them that interests him. He muses at the urbanscapes of particular areas, the architec-
ture, the amount of glamour and greenery, distances from motorways, housing density,
quality of shopping facilities, all the while trying to understand what gives these areas
a sense of Londonness.
The following passages illustrate Mason’s spirit of narrating the spaces along his
routes. This one refers to the London borough of Hammersmith:
[It] feels like one of those corners of London that’s trying to drag you out of the capital
completely. The presence of the flyover, even when you can’t see it … pervades the whole
area, never letting you entirely forget that the M4 is just a few minutes from here. So strong
is the sense of westward pull that you are afraid to stand still for too long lest you be swept
away, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. You could be in Bristol before you know it. (127)
Many others focus on the apparent poverty or wealth of a described area: “Turnham
Green is summed up by the fact that the Low Cost Mini Market has gone bust but the
Himalayan Day Spa next door seems to be thriving” (288), or: “Plaistow and everywhere
from here to Barking remains unglamorous, unkempt, unloved, even by those who
live here” (157-158). Writing about the cityscape, the author usually chooses historical
anecdotes as a means of introducing the sites to the reader. The Royal Albert Hall, for
instance, is described as a venue for an indoor marathon in 1909 (287). The Tube is, obvi-
ously, often brought to the fore as a space-organizing factor in London. Mason empha-
sizes its role in London’s territorial expansion in the 20th century; he writes about tracks,
and tunnels, stations, and roundels, enriching the story with offbeat information such
as: “Maida Vale [was] the first Tube station to be manned without men: when it opened
during the First World War the ticket collectors, porters and booking clerks were all
female” (70).
Reading simultaneously about historical human zoos and Britain’s capital city, I real-
ized that articles about the former provided an unexpected key to interpreting the book
about the latter. Although Mason’s book turned out to be a rich source of facts and
figures I have used to impress my 13-year-old London Tube expert, the most gripping
were the occasional brief remarks on the behaviour or appearance of people, inserted
2 That was the number of Tube stations in 2010.
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into the normal spatial order of the narrative. Most were short, single sentences, frozen
images, as if photographs capturing a moment. They were supposed to reflect the physi-
cal activity of walking past an object, taking a cursory glance and moving on. Then,
about halfway through the book the reader comes across the following passage describ-
ing Mason’s attitude to the world around him:
...Peter called it [London – D.G.] the best party on the planet, and it is, but it’s also the best
human zoo. ‘Only connect,’ E.M. Forster told us. ‘Live in fragments no longer.’ But some of
my happiest times in London... and certainly more and more as I came to accept that this
was my nature – have been spent as a fragment, watching all the other fragments. (124)
These words have become an invitation to read Mason’s book, whose compositional
idea is based on following the Tube lines, along alternative “human” lines. Instead of
analysing the text as a guide to London, I read it as a guide to its people3. The aim of this
article is thus to follow the author’s thought process about these “human exhibits” and
to explore the extent to which Mason’s London as a metaphorical human zoo is concep-
tually connected with historical human zoos. What follows is a presentation of Mason’s
textual images of London residents and visitors juxtaposed with the findings of contem-
porary scholarship on 19th and 20th-century ethnic shows and exhibitions.
Writing about the passers by Mark Mason came into contact during his London walks,
he positions himself into the role of a spectator. He is, on the one hand, connected –
he used to be a Londoner himself; as a walker he becomes a part of the crowd around
him4. On the other hand, he keeps his distance as someone who, in spite of feeling a
natural bond with the subjects of his observations, chooses to stay disconnected. In
many respects therefore, he resembles a 19th-century visitor to a human zoo, peering at
its inhabitants as ‘articles of curiosity’. However, Mason is not only a spectating walker,
but also an urban travel writer, selecting stories with the greatest capacity to attract his
readers. He is forced to constantly negotiate his position of a curious spectator with that
of an impresario. What becomes his double objective is to enjoy the show himself as a
member of the audience and also to entertain his readers with displays of individuals
set against the background of the capital city. His agenda is manifestly to create a spec-
tacle that will tell a particular story.
3 I deliberately avoid using the term Londoners here because individuals portrayed by the author are not
only residents, but also tourists and visitors on business.
4 Mason does not appear to epitomize Baudelaire’s flâneur “merging with the crowd” because in spite of
sharing the status of an anonymous observer and being motivated by a similar curiosity, Mason, unlike
a classic flâneur, does not have time and refuses to undertake an in-depth study of absorbed images of
people (Baudelaire 1970: 399-400).
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“Exotic” or “monstrous” individuals had been exhibited in Europe since the Middle
Ages, but rapid expansion of ethnic shows began in the middle of the 19th century.
“Savages” brought over by explorers from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas
were displayed amidst exotic animals in elaborate “authentic” settings to entertain
European audiences. The development of new media (film in particular) is credited for
why Europeans lost interest in human zoos, which gradually disappeared throughout
the 1930s. The world’s last human zoo was organized during the World Expo held in
Brussels in 1958, but it was soon closed after a series of public and diplomatic protests
against racist abuse directed at Congolese artists and artisans who were brought over
from Africa to perform at the fair (Kaas 2018; Abbattista & Iannuzzi 2016). It is esti-
mated that between 1800 and 1958, 35,000 individuals were exhibited in various kinds
of human zoos; “nearly one billion four hundred million visitors were affected by this
phenomenon” (Blanchard 2011: 5).
Commercial exotic displays that became elements of popular culture in the 19th
century “served as a primary vehicle for instructing a mass public about the distinc-
tions among ‘the varieties of mankind’” (Durbach 2008: 82). Mark Mason’s act of observ-
ing people and their interactions seems to be following exactly the same line. It is hard
to ignore his determination to see and describe the human world around him as a
bizarre, varied collection of living specimens, a living cabinet of curiosities. His vision
of London is that of a showcase of diversity. He makes conscious efforts to mention
babies as well as centenarians, men and women, straight as well as gay couples, young
professionals from the City and construction workers, Waitrose and Asda customers,
those who speak Cockney and those with heavy Italian, Irish, German, or Jamaican
accents. He focuses mostly on what ‘meets the eye’; his kaleidoscopic picture of the
people of London consists largely, though not exclusively, of his visual, rather than
auditory impressions. In any case, the aim is to emphasize the wealth of cultures, races,
nationalities, age and status groups. On Green Lanes in north-east London he watches
two middle-aged Turkish women in traditional headscarves sit in a restaurant window
making circular pide bread (Mason 2013b: 272). In the City “A Chinese man hoovers
the marble floor of an office building” (314). In front of University College Hospital,
on the steps of the A&E department he catches sight of “three or four patients, one
in a wheelchair, who have been sent outside to smoke” (32). On Upper Street he spots
“a well-dressed woman …, pushing a Mamas and Papas buggy containing an equally
well-dressed toddler …. Balanced on top of the buggy is a punnet of ripe strawberries,
which the woman eats with a white plastic fork” (35). Elsewhere he sees “a drunk in
unwashed army fatigues slumped so far forward that his head nearly meets his knees”
(32). Occasionally, he also resorts to eavesdropping. Outside Finchley Central on the
Northern Line he hears “an Irish guy in his fifties saying to a younger Muslim woman,
‘I don’t want a political argument, I just think he was a very, very good painter” (234).
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Mason’s human zoo is characterized by impressive plurality. However, while in the
19th/20th century “instructing about the distinctions among the varieties of mankind”
had racist undertones and was supposed to emphasize the superiority of the onlook-
ers (Sánchez-Gómez 2013: 21), the author’s approach is clearly affected by the protocols
of political correctness. His metaphorical human zoo is a carefully designed product
of 21st-century culture that celebrates diversity, recognizes complexity and distinctive-
ness of the culture of the Other, commits itself to equity and does not accept overt preju-
dice. Mason the impresario ensures that his audience is presented with an attractively
miscellaneous assemblage of “exhibits”, but he also cautiously avoids transgressing the
rules of contemporary diversity discourses. Thus, in spite of their ontological differ-
ence, historical human zoos and Mason’s are alike because they both serve as literal
and metaphorical exhibitions of time-specific approaches to otherness.
Most of Mason’s people-watching moments in London are documented in the book
by brief descriptions of more or less bizarre individuals. However, the author enjoys
also seeing people as parts of some collectivities or tribes, distinguishing themselves
from the surroundings by their behaviour or the images they project. Similar to the
communities of exotic humans in “Japanese Villages” or “Senegalese Villages” of the
past, certain groups of contemporary inhabitants and visitors to London make sense to
the author only when spectated in their “tribal” context. Their movements and actions
are scrutinized by Mason the spectator, but there is a noticeable difference between the
assumptions underlying his gaze and that of the audiences of actual human zoos. As
Raymond Corbey put it pointedly: “…the natives figured as categories in Western repre-
sentations of the Self, as characters in the story of the ascent to civilization, depicted as
the inevitable triumph of higher races over lower ones and as progress through science
and imperial conquest” (1993: 341). Mason’s favourite “savages” appear to be young
professionals, his juniors by around a decade or two, whom he watches with amaze-
ment mixed with nostalgia for his own passing youth. After a visit to the City he writes:
The next thing I notice is very un-Whitechapel and all the more surprising for creeping up on
me so insidiously. More and more of the people passing by are young men in suits, looking
not unlike young men in suits in London at any point over the last century or so, except
for one thing: the vertical line of the tie is absent, replaced by the diagonal line of a bag’s
shoulder strap. Then it dawns on me that many of these young men are accompanied by
young women, also in twenty-first-century office-casual. The couples carry shopping bags
full of Sainsbury’s ready meals and mid-range Merlots. … Yes, Whitechapel is being yuppified.
Not in the eighties sense of the word (braces, floppy hair, enormous mobiles), but in the
strict, acronymistic sense: Young Urban Professionals. Twenty-five years ago it was Fulham.
Now the tribe’s more restrained members are colonizing the east. (Mason 2013b: 153-154)
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The author positions himself in the stalls, he does not join his specimens or stand
next to them on stage. The tribe of young urban professionals is clearly “them”, not “us”,
but it is the “them” that epitomizes progress, development, the future. This dichotomy
becomes even more pronounced in another passage, this time set against the modern
backdrop of Canary Wharf: “Smart young professionals queue at the coffee and juice
outlets; a man in his fifties stands out, with his moustache and sensible coat and tweed
cap. I feel an impostor too, sitting in Starbucks surrounded by a sea of iPads while
I consult my paper notes about walking a Tube line” (318). The 19th/20th-century binary
of wilderness and civilization, with the exhibited people in their staged tribal milieu,
being the representatives of the former, is reversed in Mason’s 21st-century human zoo.
The author does not altogether avoid opposition between modernity and backwardness,
civilized and barbaric in its more colonial form. Writing about Westfield shopping centre,
Mason allows himself a rare moment of openness in expressing the feeling of superior-
ity at the sight of its customers. Without a trace of self-guilt and remorse he describes
visitors to this “hideous”, “spiritless”, “grandiose”, “depressing” place in a clearly disap-
proving tone: “…people wander the fridge-white floors in that special slow-motion state
of reverence reserved for Awesome Retail Experience” (131); or less directly: “Westfield
is staggeringly, unnaturally vast, the sort of shopping ‘maul’ to which specially charted
coach trips of middle-aged women pay pilgrimage” (117). The degree of Mason’s snob-
bish disdain for Westfield patrons is surprising, given that he is normally very careful
not to seem rude or moralistic. Paradoxically, these critical remarks appear in the only
passage in Mason’s book where the actual London human zoo is mentioned5. Mason’s
refusal to recognize Westfield as a ‘natural habitat’ for some Londoners and his aloof-
ness bring him closest to the spectators in 19th and 20th-century human zoos, reinforc-
ing “the comfortable binary of savage/civilized that encouraged even working-class audi-
ences to imagine themselves to be members of an imperial ruling class” (Durbach 2008:
83). The Westfield fragment of Mark Mason’s narrative reveals a sense of superiority
over at least some objects of his observation. This would, to some degree, explain why he
found the association of London with a human zoo so appealing. Just as with European
and American audiences that rendered themselves “comfortably common and safely
standard” in confrontation with exotic “exhibits” (Garland-Thomson 2008: 56), Mark
Mason reassures himself of his “normality” when he chooses to “walk round [Westfield]
rather than through it” (Mason 2013b: 117) and when he confesses on another occasion:
“Actually it would be unfair to say there isn’t a single good thing about Westfield. There is:
the security guard who tells me how to take a shortcut out of it” (131).
5 “Part of the site used to be the White City exhibition ground, where in 1908 the attractions at the Fran-
co-British Exhibition included a ‘Senegalese Village’, inhabited by 150 Africans specially shipped in”
(Mason 2013b: 117).
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Humans who were displayed in zoos were separated from the spectators by a real
or imaginary barrier (Tour 2011: 7). As Raymond Corbey explains: “It was unthinkable
that they [the exhibited people – D.G.] should mingle spontaneously with the visitors,
and usually there were few possibilities for contact between parties” (1993: 344). Mark
Mason’s fantasy human zoo stretching along the lines of the Tube also features barri-
ers. In the majority of cases they are abstract, mental walls built by the author whose
nature is to be “a fragment, watching all the other fragments”. In some other instances,
they are very literal – panes of glass separating the spectating walker from the people
he is watching. Passages relating to the latter are in fact among the most appealing in
the whole book. Glimpsing through the windows of houses, hotels and offices he passes
on the way, the author admits “feeling unnervingly like James Stewart in Rear Window”
(Mason 2013b: 78), but he still succumbs to the temptation. What he sees and then
describes are pieces of somebody else’s life, tantalizingly fragmentary: “On the fourth
floor a Japanese man stands immobile in trousers and a vest, fruitlessly trying to work
his TV remote control. Directly underneath him an excited kid uses a bed as a trampo-
line” (78); or “A short row of Georgian houses have different arrangements of shutters
in place. Under the top half of one set I see a couple’s four hands eating chops and peas;
over the bottom half of another I see a woman peeling potatoes watched by her Siamese
cat, which sits on the work surface” (156). Unaware of being observed (contrary to the
living exhibits in human zoos), the seen do not reciprocate Mason’s gaze; their lives
remain secret and unknown (just like the lives of individuals behind the fences enclos-
ing “authentic ethnic villages” in European cities). Keeping a physical distance enforced
by trenches, railings or balustrades, audiences in 19th/20th-century human zoos reduced
their observation to the exterior appearance of the people on display. Unable, and possi-
bly unwilling, to interact with the human exhibits behind the barriers, yet convinced of
encountering authentic indigenous “savages”, those Europeans constructed their own
picture of the exotic. Their “imperial eyes” (Pratt 1992: 3) were fed with images that
consolidated the stereotypical view of the colonized world as wild, uncivilized, primi-
tive. The way Mark Mason looks at the living specimens in his human zoo is definitely
not a typical objectifying “imperial gaze” as described by Ann Kaplan. Nevertheless,
her thesis that “the subject bearing the gaze is not interested in the object per se, but
is consumed by his own anxieties” (Kaplan 1997: xviii) can be tentatively employed
to expose Mason’s agenda. Like the spectators, who despite the fences blocking their
interaction with the Other, flocked to “ethnic villages” in search of the authentic, Mark
Mason collects the visual memories of anonymous lives enclosed by window frames in
the belief that they represent London’s true character.
The most successful human zoos of the past took care to balance sex and age among
their “living exhibits”. It was believed that “the presence of women and children made a
show especially attractive and gave a better picture of ‘the foreign people’s family lives’”
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(Thode-Arora 2008: 169). Mason’s human zoo in Walk the Lines is a perfectly balanced
one. My rough estimate of the number of entries mentioning women and men reveals
the author’s impressive care for gender equality. Even the choice of behavioral charac-
teristics that attract Mason’s attention in male and female objects is remarkably unbi-
ased. So, as he walks past a day spa, his eyes fall upon “A semi-reclined businesswoman
[gazing] vacantly out of the window as the soles of her feet are rubbed” (Mason 2013b: 76)
and then he notices a man in a nail clinic, who “sits with his hands on the desk, having
for some reason crossed them over, a different woman working on each while a third
squats to beautify his feet” (240). Elsewhere he overhears a mother saying: “You’re really
starting to piss me off!” to her toddler son (285), but to maintain his gender equilibrium
he also reports passing “A man on an expensive mountain-bike calmly [reasoning] with
his screaming daughter” (70). Sarcastic comments are delivered according to the rules
of gender parity, too. Mason sounds acerbically when he writes: “…at Goodge Street
station a woman of a certain age meets her friend, though because of the ‘work’ with
which she’s sought to deny said age, her face is incapable of expressing emotions, so a
hug is all the friend gets” (217). He appears no less sarcastic when he asks a rhetorical
question: “Why do people do that?” after seeing a “labourer who despite a pronounced
Tennent’s Tummy has chosen to tuck his T-shirt in” (194). To complete the picture, the
spectacle in Mason’s book is enriched by a few casual glances at children. In historical
human zoos children were usually exhibited along with their parents or other adults,
thus providing the “knowledge” about exotic people’s caregiving practices and “support-
ing the idea that the exhibition illustrated an ordinary … way of life” (Andreassen 2015:
89). Almost all children mentioned by Mason are accompanied by their parents and
there is no doubt that the author’s reason for selecting particular images was identi-
cal with that of human exhibition managers. Incorporating the scenes of children at
play (with a trampoline, a bicycle and a home video game console), children talking or
arguing with their mums and dads, children being taken care of, Mason intends to give
his portrait of London’s population a sense of authenticity. This is an awareness strategy
which he clearly shares with Carl Hagenbeck and other 19th and 20th-century exhibitors.
Mason remembers that in a zoo it is not only the variety on show, but also the
exoticism of the specimens that seduces the public. Individuals who were selected to
inhabit 19th/20th-century human zoos were supposed to appear strange to the specta-
tors (Thode-Arora 2008: 167-168). People of unfamiliar appearance or behavior were to
meet the public’s expectations of arousing powerful sensations and their desire for the
spectacular, novel or bizarre (Tour 2011: 10). On a visit to his London human zoo, Mason
appears to be particularly alert to the incongruous, always on the lookout for oddity.
Most examples of human behaviour in his book concern discrepancy between a stereo-
typical image and observed reality. In the following passage the author focuses on a
spectacular incongruity between the subject’s age and appearance:
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The traffic lights on the far side of the Palace conveniently turn red as I want to cross, halting a
woman who’s seventy if she’s a day, sitting astride a huge 1970s Suzuki motorbike, cigarette
hanging vertically from her bottom lip. Once across, I turn to see her roar away. The back of
her denim jacket says: ‘The Clash.’ (Mason 2013b: 27)
The description of the woman’s peculiar appearance is obviously supposed to add a
comic touch to the narrative. As a “living specimen”, it is also possible that she was
to be a dramatic example of English eccentricity. Further on in the book Mason once
again focuses on provoking inconsistency in image. At King’s Cross the author watches
passengers leaving the train: “One of the alighting passengers is a monk, wearing black
robes and sandals, carrying an ultra-modern plastic suitcase in day-glo green” (33).
Both the elderly woman riding a motorbike and the monk with neon accessories capture
the spectator’s attention because the images they present are perceived as bizarre. On
other occasions, the “strangeness effect” is produced by exactly the opposite; that is, the
remarkable intensity of “representativeness” or “typicality”. Such an example is to be
had when Mason experiences watching joggers near East Putney station on the District
Line: “Among the few males of the breed are two blond late-teen twins, maintaining a
frightening pace; disturbingly Aryan” (172). A similar mechanism of perception is trig-
gered by the sight of a “builder putting on his boots in Tooley Street [and showing] the
obligatory bum cleavage” (316). The word “obligatory” reveals that it is not the scene as
such, but its very predictability that causes amusement, attracts attention, makes the
view exotic (however self-contradictory it might appear).
In her study of human exhibitions, Rikke Andreassen indicates that “The act of
describing holds an inherent power …. Those who described or staged the [human] exhi-
bitions had the power to define the others” (2015: 3). She provides an example of African
people who were often stereotypically “positioned as barbaric savages and represen-
tatives of a lower and uncivilized race” (51). This negative portrayal of the exhibited
individuals was believed, paradoxically, to appeal to the white audience because of its
potential to emphasize the white race’s perceived superiority. The way Mark Mason
handles the issue of depicting the non-white – Black and Asian – inhabitants of his
metaphorical London human zoo is a vivid testimony to the monumental change that
has taken place in our understanding of “the power to describe others”. Mason very
carefully avoids negative ethnic stereotyping and whenever he suspects that his depic-
tion could be interpreted as prejudiced, he immediately acknowledges being too hasty
in his judgements. One example of such an approach comes from the passage referring
to the author’s brief encounter with the inhabitants of a once shabby neighbourhood
near Tottenham Hale station. It reads: “Leaving the park, I see, out of the corner of my
eye, a black man talking to a friend”. The author quotes the man’s words verbatim to
preserve the flavor of Jamaican English:
16........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) ‘They is all cheesing me off, blood, innit?’ he says. ‘They is like >what you lookin’ at?I is lookin’ at you, man
........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
narrative. Mason does not – to quote a famous London walker Virginia Woolf – “dig
deeper than the eye approves” (1930: 7). His group portrait of the people of London is
visually attractive, but it is not meant to provoke any unsettling questions or challenge
dominant discourses of diversity and multiculturalism. Mason’s readers are presented
with an account of his quest for the “soul” of London, but they soon realize that they are
following the author along paths that have been well trodden. Designing his London
zoo, Mason makes no random choices – every single individual who is displayed to
the reading public contributes to a coherent whole. The selection of images which are
supposed to represent London’s diversity is very much in line with the Foucauldian
suggestion concerning the essence of observation, which is systematizing, taming the
unknown and turning it into an entity that can be easily analyzed, “recognized by all,
and thus given a name that everyone will be able to understand” (Foucault 1994: 134).
The twenty-first-century British metropolis is commonly “recognized” as a multi-ethnic
and multi-cultural “entity” and Mason portrays it accordingly in Walk the Lines. Whether
consciously or not, he perpetuates the dominant narrative through his authority of a
London walker who has “travelled into the heart of the greatest city in the world, then
back out again” (Mason 2013b: 10).
Historical human zoos provided an opportunity to demonstrate the modernity and
cultural superiority of western civilization. Mark Mason’s London human zoo tells the
story of a population that is modern in the 21st-century sense: tolerant, cosmopolitan,
non-violent, stylish, youthful, egalitarian, and whose only failing is that it succumbs
easily to the allure of consumer capitalism. A conclusion that can be drawn from the
reading of books such as Mason’s, but also of some better known contemporary London
walkers – Iain Sinclair (2003a; 2003b; 2017) or Peter Ackroyd (2000) – is that while
21st-century human zoos are no longer physical spaces in big cities, but metaphori-
cal spaces in books about big cities, they still serve a very similar purpose, which is to
mould people’s imagination and influence readers’ way of thinking through entertain-
ment. The human shows of the past were meant to “persuade, deceive and manipulate
[the public opinion into embracing] racism, segregation and eugenist ideas” (Blanchard
2011: 5). Their underlying objective was to justify colonization (Knox 2016: 21-22). The
human zoo in works such as Walking the Lines is the spectacle of idealized multicultural-
ism, with the writer playing the role of an impresario guided by the goal of constructing
a narrative portrait of a perfectly harmonious, postcolonial metropolis.
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rum_01_abbattista.html (20 October 2019).
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Ackroyd, P. 2000. London. The Biography. London: Vintage.
Andreassen, R. 2015. Human Exhibitions. Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays.
Furnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
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Vintage Books.
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ty. In: P. Blanchard et al. (eds.), Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial
Empires, 52-61. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Kaplan, A. 1997. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York:
Routledge.
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(20 October 2019).
Knox, K. E. 2016. Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
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& Nicolson.
Mason, M. 2013a. Move Along, Please. Land’s End to John O’Groats by Local Bus. London:
Random House.
Mason, M. 2017. Question Time. A Journey Round Britain’s Quizzes. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
Mason, M. 2013b. Walk the Lines. The London Underground, Overground. London: Arrow
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Morris, D. 1996 [1969]. The Human Zoo. New York-Tokyo-London: Kodansha International.
Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
Sánchez-Gómez, Luis A. 2013. Human zoos or ethnic shows? Essence and contingency in
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Sekula, A. 1986. The body and the archive. October 39: 3-64.
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***
Dorota Guzowska is a Lecturer in British Studies and British History at the University of
Bialystok. Her research is focused on the concepts of fatherhood and emotional commu-
nities in early modern England. She has published on autobiographical writing, paren-
tal identity and aspects of seventeenth-century medical care. Her interests include also:
class in contemporary Britain and hegemonic discourse.
20........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
JULIA KULA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2020.28.1.02
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University
ORCID: 0000-0003-0143-4874
Lost in space, lost in
himself: Paul Auster’s
Ghosts and the
postmodern city
Abstract. Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, is generically classified as
anti-detective fiction. The dominant setting of the novel, the urban space of New York and the ob-
servatory apartment located in it, is endowed with postmodern qualities, which leads to the trans-
formation of the specificity of the investigation and its departure from one that is traditional.
Whereas, traditionally, in detective fiction the dominant space, be it a locked room or a city, to mention
a few, offers the sleuth clues necessary for solving the case, in the postmodern story of detection these
clues are disorienting or meaningless. Hence, the primary aim of this article is to examine the interrela-
tion between the dominating chronotope in the novel and the investigation led by the protagonist, Blue.
I intend to prove how the surroundings contribute to the replacement of rational and objective judgment
of the case with personal engagement. The article also aims at providing an overview of the transfor-
mations of urban space in detective fiction, which functions as the introduction to a further discussion.
Keywords: Auster, Ghosts, postmodern detective fiction, space, chronotope.
“The critical scene of the mystery is when the detective enters.”
~ Maureen Johnson
1. The evolution of urban space in detective fiction
Referring to the research on the significance of space in detective fiction, David Schmid
argues that a great majority of criticism “engages with the role of space in crime fiction
in a relatively passive manner, which means that houses, suburbs, cities and so on are
treated merely as background or setting rather than as determinative forces” (2012:
7-8). However, it must be noted that from the very beginnings of detective fiction, the
dominant space – borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, the major chronotope – does
not only represent a dominating space that functions as the background for events.
1 Address for correspondence: Wydział Humanistyczny, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Plac Marii
Curie-Skłodowskiej 4A, 20-031 Lublin, Poland. E-mail: julia.kula@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl
21........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
As Bakhtin expounds, chronotopes “are the organizing centers for the fundamental
narrative events in the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narra-
tive are tied and untied... to them belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative” (1981:
250). Chronotopes are rigidly organised structures that specifically shape the run of the
action and determine primary themes and motifs prevalent in the genre.
Looking at the recurrent chronotopes in detective fiction, apart from the locked room
introduced by Poe and the country house prevalent, for instance, in Agatha Christie’s
fiction, another spatio-temporal continuum, modelled by Arthur Conan Doyle in
Sherlock Holmes stories, is the city. Immersed in urban space, the detective seeks mean-
ingful clues that would enable him to decipher the narrative of the crime or the mystery.
Hence, in traditional detective fiction, the chronotope of the city functions as a map
on which diverse elements “are the guardians of some secret... Every twist of the road
is like a finger pointing to it.... there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall
that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it
were a telegram or a postcard” (Chesterton 1901: 75). The city in the earliest representa-
tives of detective fiction can be compared to a map on which diverse clues are scattered.
As Christopher Pittard points out, modernism that brought the emergence of detective
fiction is associated with “[t]he collapsing of urban experience into an overwhelming
collage of signs (both semiotically and literally)” (2010: 113), which is accentuated in the
portrayal of the dominant chronotope from that period. When put together and deci-
phered, these signs create a coherent narrative of the committed crime.
The new variant of detective fiction that was initiated in America in the early 1920s
– the hard-boiled one – predominantly redefined the representation of urban space in
the genre. Contemporary problems, such as “civic and corporate corruption” (Pepper
2010: 143), capitalism, “endemic violence, and the remoteness of institutionalized law
from any broader concept of justice” (Horsley 2005: 6), brought about by new circum-
stances, were the focal point of the then emerging convention. Urban space was no
longer seen solely as a guardian of secrets, as in the traditional detective novel. The
modern city, serving as the dominant chronotope in the genre, “becomes the waste-
land”, “a man-made desert or cavern of lost humanity” (Cawelti 1977: 155) to which the
detective is not able to restore any order to, as was the case in traditional and classi-
cal stories of detection. Its physical construction reveals negative qualities of space as
“an intractable, uncontainable, ultimately unknowable terrain, to be grasped only in a
fragmentary way” (Horsley 2005: 71). Apart from the impossibility to fully comprehend
what is inscribed in the cityscape, the private eye has to confront the unfavourable
circumstances that await him in the city. As such, urban space “threatens a protago-
nist’s sense of a discrete self, his powers of understanding, and his physical safety”
(Horsley 2005: 71).
22........................................................................................ CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 28 (2020) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
As it has been mentioned before, the dominant chronotope does not represent the
passive background, but actively shapes the narrative. Hence, there exists a close inter-
dependence between the specificity of urban space in particular variants of the genre
and the figure of the detective. The spatial image of the world in detective fiction – in
this case the city – “on the one hand... is created by man, and on the other, it actively
forms the person immersed in it” (Lotman 1990: 204). In traditional stories of detection,
the chronotope “called for a cultural figure with particular expertise in reading such
signs and in disregarding irrelevant information” (Pittard 2010: 113). These signs, not
obvious and immediately visible, have to be collected and put into one, coherent whole
by the detective whose rationality and excellent skills of deduction are instrumental
in unravelling the mystery. As Jerome Delamater and Ruth Prigozy accentuate, “[t]he
power to solve mysteries is, of course, the fundamental—and, quite possibly, the only—
property that distinguishes all detectives of conventional mystery fiction” (1997: 33).
The new urban chronotope as shaped in the hard-boiled variant is associated with a
diverse type of detective. The sleuth, although a professional one, is no longer portrayed
“as a brilliant eccentric with transcendent powers of ratiocination but as an ordinary
man” (Cawelti 1977: 145) with flaws and vices. The unfavourable circumstances that
form the narrative require a new hero, “a loner, an alienated individual who exists
outside or beyond the socioeconomic order of family, friends, work, and home” (Scaggs
2005: 59); a figure with his own moral and ethical codes that usually deviate from social-
ly acceptable ones. Since the detective is no longer endowed with almost superhuman
abilities, the nature of his quest also differs. As Scaggs observes, “there is little or no
analysis of clues and associated analytic deduction. Rather, the hard-boiled detective’s
investigations, involving direct questioning and movement from place to place, parallel
the sort of tracking down of a quarry” (2005: 59). As such, instead of an ordered process
of detection, the investigation resembles an “adventure in search of a hidden truth”
(Chandler 1944: 237), often replete with perilous situations and risky confrontations.
2. Postmodern detective fiction
Although there can be enumerated crucial differences between the dominant chrono-
topes and the construction of the private eye in the traditional story of detection and the
hard-boiled variant, the fundamental formula is still based on the detective’s inquiry
leading to the solution. Yet, in the postmodern detective novel, which is the focal point
of this article, the formulaic pattern is subject to some significant alterations not only in
terms of space and characters, but also in terms of the formula itself, which makes the
convention problematic to categorise. These reformulations result in some critics, such
as Stefano Tani, perceiving the postmodern story of detection “not as the continuation
of the genre but as a transgression of it, or as a mutation” (1984: 30). Other critics, such
as Patricia Merivale or Susan-Elizabeth Sweeney emphasise its specificity, claiming that
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