![](http://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:book:9781783085149/resource/name/9781783085149i.jpg)
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaching the City
- Chapter One Producing the City
- Chapter Two Urban Oppositions: Producing French Space in Nineteenth-Century London
- Chapter Three Revealing and Reconstructing London
- Chapter Four Wandering Geometry: Order and Identity in New York
- Chapter Five Writing around the Lines: Interpretive Travel Writing
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Chapter Three - Revealing and Reconstructing London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaching the City
- Chapter One Producing the City
- Chapter Two Urban Oppositions: Producing French Space in Nineteenth-Century London
- Chapter Three Revealing and Reconstructing London
- Chapter Four Wandering Geometry: Order and Identity in New York
- Chapter Five Writing around the Lines: Interpretive Travel Writing
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Hidden away behind the busy streets and main thoroughfares of the old city of London there exists a secret city of narrow alleyways, timber framed buildings and hidden courtyards that really make for an enjoyable and original experience.
Jones 2008, 1As we have seen in the previous chapter, in constant tension with the representations of space of London's orderly West End and tourist attractions are spaces of urban disorder, social ‘dysfunction’, and poverty that continually threaten to depose the institutional and ideological clarity of the figured city. For the French travellers examined in this chapter, spaces of disorder perform in correspondence and contrast with the monumentality of more official sites. Disorder is a trope that provides a key to analysing these travellers’ strategies for making meaning for London during the interwar period – in the case of Jacques Dyssord (1880–1952) – and in the immediate aftermath of World War II – in Alfred Leroy's narrative (1897–?). The underbelly of London's metropolitan life in the first half of the twentieth century is at once repellent and fascinating to the traveller and, furthermore, this underbelly is consistently identified with the act of revealing or uncovering, and with the notion of an ‘authentic’ space, a space of everyday life amid ordinary working people, that posits an alternative social space to that of the public sphere officially sanctioned by monumental or institutional architectures. In the travel account, we are presented with an articulation of itineraries; pathways through the city organized in response to, but never in exact compliance with, the rational logic of the urban planner's viewpoint. Space, at street level, is malleable, shifting in response to the walker's changing perspective, presenting opportunities to confound the diagrammatic stability of the map through the multiple ways in which travellers, as practitioners of space, orient themselves, temporalize places through narrative, rendering places as spaces and making visible the polyvalence of meaning in the city. Certeau emphasizes the potential for space, as practised by narrative, to move away from its diagrammatic clarity and become ‘delinquent’:
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. In Greek, narration is called ‘diegesis’: it establishes an itinerary (it ‘guides’) and it passes through it (it ‘transgresses’).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Alternative Modernities in French Travel WritingEngaging Urban Space in London and New York, 1851-1986, pp. 107 - 136Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016