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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
The city is a poem, ... but not a classical poem, not a poem centered on a subject. It is a poem which deploys the signifier, and it is this deployment which the semiology of the city must ultimately attempt to grasp and make sing.
Roland Barthes, "Semiology and Urbanism"
In his excellent study What Is Pastoral? Paul Alpers maintains that pastoral has long been a genre open to a variety of definitions and interpretations. "It sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it," Alpers muses at the beginning of this magisterial book (8). Still, several shared characteristics exist among the many versions that Alpers considers. One major point of agreement involves the pastoral space. Most critics who attempt some definition of the pastoral refer not only to a mode of writing but also to a space conducive to the themes that this writing seeks to express. In earlier work, Alpers himself has argued that a key aspect of pastoral literature is its "creation of imaginative space," or a sovereign "domain" wherein one has the right to do as one pleases ("Pastoral"). Often, such an imagined space is marked by the play, or free rein, granted to those who enter its haven. In the pastoral space, one is able to play a new role, or to disguise oneself, so that one might enter into other, more beneficial relationships. The aristocrats who parade as shepherds in classical or early modern pastoral, for example, partake of new roles not only to entertain themselves but to seek forms of human community that may have been blindly eschewed by advancing civilization. As such, the pastoral space is the perfect locale for those who believe themselves to be in flight from a more sober and proscriptive (though no less imaginative) space, be it a nation, a fatherland, or even one's own interpellated identity. As Andrew Ettin has suggested, in the pastoral space one finds that a "useful disguise" somehow enables more natural bonds and knowledges to be recovered, reimagined, and reestablished (28).
Yet even if the opportunity that pastoral space offers is often agreed upon, the "place" (or placement) of the pastoral remains a point of contention. Since it is a site of refuge, disguise, play, and rearrangement, many would probably concur that the space of the pastoral is marked by a profound sense of ambiguity and indeterminacy. Indeed, it is this semiotic vibrancy, this "placelessness," that the pastoral wants to nurture rather than (re)place. But, given the chance, where would we find, chart, or "place" such semiotic spaces, and how would we recognize such a place-in-space if we saw one? I find that such questions about semiotic ambiguity and its placement are especially useful when we try to define the "urban pastoral," a rather mysterious subgenre which has often been used to describe the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the New York school of poets, and which I want to extend to a consideration of Gary Snyder and the San Francisco Renaissance.
As if to underscore its somewhat ambiguous nature, Susan Sontag tells us that the phrase "urban pastoral" was coined by William Empson, himself a great chronicler of types of ambiguity (108).(1) The term "pastoral," which is usually associated with bucolic scenes of nature, and the term "urban," which is usually coded as the scene of a natural artifice from which the pastoral singer is in flight, might appear at first glance to make for a rather unseemly partnership. Yet we should see that the city (like the pastoral) is a space of escape, and that the pastoral (like the city) is a space wherein artificial role-playing reigns. To put it more succinctly, both the "urban" and the "pastoral" mark zones where subjectivity is always in play and hence subject to newly ambiguous possibilities that allow one to escape from deleterious proscriptions. The city is, in fact, one of the best sites for the pastoral, since it contains a wealth of offerings available for those who want to change their roles, abandon a fixed identity, or otherwise disguise themselves.
Ultimately, it is my contention that the place-in-space that the urban pastoral signifies is inextricably tied to movements or spacings that cross, negotiate, or (de)construct its very borders. According to Michel de Certeau, "space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.... In short, space is a practiced place" (117). As the title of one of his most famous essays intimates, de Certeau is most apt to locate this type of practiced spatiality when "walking in the city" (91-110). Urban pastorals, like New York and San Francisco, are constructed in much the same ambulatory spirit, since I find that they owe their allure to a "practiced movement" of certain individuals, whose tactical subversiveness undermines the stability normally ascribed to place. The result is often quite liberatory. When rigorously "practiced," once-banal sites become fantastic situations, and urban places become pastoral "spaces" of relentlessly directional and semiotic play.
In their culturally overcoded movements, Gary Snyder and Frank O'Hara helped to construct the semiotic spaces of "otherness" critics recognize as uniquely pastoral. Throughout this essay, I attempt to show that, as Snyder and O'Hara "practiced" the place of the urban pastoral, their bodies became marked by their communities as unique signifiers of desired mobility. In making this link, I want to suggest that literary communities, such as those that convened in New York and San Francisco in the years following World War II, are especially dependent upon certain members, whose features tend to take on the likeness of a desired otherness, or whose bodies tend to move through space in a particularly alluring way. If a series of tactical moves through city space does indeed draw new lines of difference, I think it is also true that the community takes pains to recognize the individuals who are most adept at making those moves. Thus, in what I would call a secondary maneuver, the community completes its cathexis by marking these mobile bodies as signs of the differences they have seen fit to draw. When conceived in this way, the body whose movement draws new city limits becomes both the sign that reorders urban space and a site fit for communal sharing.(2) My study of New York and San Francisco will show two poets whose features and movements best embodied, signified, and placed the semiotic vibrancy of their particular urban location. In fulfilling these roles, each poet became a "semiotic shepherd," a guiding force for the adventurous flocks who gathered in the liberatory spaces of the urban pastoral.
In the 1950s, New York and San Francisco were real yet somewhat anomalous American places where cultural diversity dissolved fixed definitions of national identity. As "other spaces" in America's midst, these two locales became havens for the free-thinking citizens who sought alternative forms of imagined community. If the cold war assigned Americans a strictly conservative script of right conduct, New York and San Francisco offered a space where semiotic subversiveness could disrupt and rewrite a variety of proscribed identities, including those of national, racial, and sexual character.
Perhaps I can give a clearer understanding of this kind of urban semiology by referencing a more recent representation from Britain. The following scenario is taken from Hanif Kureishi's screenplay for his 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In this scene, Sammy, an English citizen of Pakistani heritage, tries to explain to his uncle Raft his refusal to return "home" to South Asia, where, according to Rafi's logic, "you will be valued, ... you will be rich and powerful." Sammy is at this point prompted to defend the bohemian life he leads with his lover, the white radical Rosie, in a Thatcherite England increasingly hostile to "Pakis" and other minorities:
SAMMY: I am home, Pop. This is the bosom. RAFI: ... What can you possibly like about this city now? SAMMY: Well ... (Now we see a number of London scenes that SAMMY and ROSIE like: SAMMY and ROSIE are walking along the towpath towards Hammersmith Bridge.) (Voice over) On Saturdays we like to walk along the towpath at Hammersmith and kiss and argue. (Next we see SAMMY and ROSIN in "Any Amount of Books.") (Voice over) Then we go to the bookshop and buy novels written by women. (Next, SAMMY and ROSIN outside the Albert Hall.) (Voice over) Or we trot past the Albert Hall and up through Hyde Park. On Saturday nights things really hot up. (Cut to: outside the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.) (Voice over) If we can get cheap seats we go to a play at the Royal Court. But if there's nothing on that hasn't been well reviewed by the Guardian--... [w]e go to an Alternative Cabaret in Earl's Court in the hope of seeing our government abused. Or if we're really desperate for entertainment--(We are now in the seminar room at the ICA. COLIN MCCABE is talking to an enthralled audience about Derrida. A member of the audience has her hand up.) (Voice over) We go to a seminar on semiotics at the ICA which Rosie especially enjoys. (ROSIE also has her hand up. But MCCABE points to someone else. ROSIE looks at SAMMY, disgusted with MCCABE'S indifference to her.) AUDIENCE MEMBER: What, would you say, is the relation between a bag of crisps and the self-enclosed unity of the linguistic sign? (COLIN MCCABE starts to laugh.) SAMMY: (Voice over) We love our city and we belong to it. Neither of us are English, we're Londoners you see. (233-34)
To my mind, this is a perfect description of an urban pastoral. The riches of the city are on full display as we see the young couple sampling a variety of cultural events, many of which run counter to the prevailing conservatism of Britain in the 1980s. I want to call particular attention, however, to the last item on Sammy's list: the lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art. We will notice that Colin McCabe's discussion is on semiotics, a shifting signification system open to many different readings. Such semiotic play is precisely the liberation Sammy and Rosie find plentiful as they traipse through London. Even in the xenophobic climate of Thatcher's Britain, the interracial couple is able to locate a haven in the city, a semiotic space within which binary separations and cultural proscriptions are always subject to collapse and reconfiguration. In this haven, "Londoners" are allowed a freedom that eludes the increasingly constricted meaning of "English" citizenship.
That Kureishi's walking tour of liberatory city space ends up at McCabe's seminar on the signifier should not surprise us if we recall the etymological root of the word "semiotics." In Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja reminds us that "semiotics" derives from the Greek semeion, "which means sign, mark, spot or point in space. You arrange to meet someone at a semeion, a particular place. The significance of this connection between semiotics and spatiality is too often forgotten" (246n). McCabe's semiotics lecture, and indeed the various places in which Sammy and Rosie convene, are such points in space. In the semeion called London, where Sammy and Rosie are able to "belong" to various identities otherwise denied them, we see the type of intercultural haven that San Francisco and New York offered poets during America's cold war years. Those who gathered in those semeions were, like Sammy and Rosie in London, free to define themselves as "San Franciscans" or "New Yorkers" without necessarily viewing themselves as American.
As semeions, New York and San Francisco could not have been better situated. Perched on the nation's geographic periphery, these two immigration centers accorded a new definition of "American" identity largely at odds with a xenophobic cold war climate. Indeed, part of the allure for the poets and artists who traveled to New York and San Francisco consisted in the various spaces within each city (bars, coffeehouses, galleries, studios, jazz clubs, parks) where world cultures intermingled. Each city was a cultural crossroads whose complexity could never be fully policed by cold war nationalists. To partake of an emerging global scene, all an American artist needed was to get herself or himself to one of these sites.
In New York, the abstract expressionist painting that evolved from a confluence of European emigres (Willem de Kooning from Holland, Mark Rothko from Russia,...
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