Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Time of the Suburb
- 1 The Everyman and his Car: Metropolitan Memory and the Novel Sequence
- 2 Suburban Gothic and Banal Unhomeliness
- 3 Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir
- 4 Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home
- 5 Devolved Authorship, Suburban Literacies and the Short Story Cycle
- Conclusion: Built to Last? Staging Suburban Historicity in the Teardown Era
- Notes
- Index
4 - Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Time of the Suburb
- 1 The Everyman and his Car: Metropolitan Memory and the Novel Sequence
- 2 Suburban Gothic and Banal Unhomeliness
- 3 Some Shared Story: Suburban Memoir
- 4 Houses, Comics, Fish: Graphic Narrative Ecologies of the Suburban Home
- 5 Devolved Authorship, Suburban Literacies and the Short Story Cycle
- Conclusion: Built to Last? Staging Suburban Historicity in the Teardown Era
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre invites his readers to ‘consider a house’:
The house has six storeys and an air of stability about it. One might almost see it as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its stark, cold and rigid outlines. (Built around 1950: no metal or plate glass yet.) Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits.
Lefebvre's ‘critical analysis’ is instructive, for it helps defamiliarise this most ubiquitous and unassuming of sites. His account vividly demonstrates that domestic space is in fact not as solid and inert as it so often seems. Rather, houses are complexes of forces and flows, and are connected to the wider world in myriad ways. Crucially, dispelling the illusion of a house's discreteness and immobility helps to combat the widespread and profoundly ideological conceptualisation of space as a neutral container whose only purpose is to receive and maintain whatever has been placed within it. (Such a view, of course, makes impossible an understanding of space as socially produced, and works against an appreciation of the ways spatial forms engender social relations.) On the other hand, Lefebvre acknowledges that the mode of analysis he has exemplified risks substituting a place's practical character with a fetishised abstraction in which ‘users’ cannot recognise themselves, and against which it is impossible to ‘conceive of adopting a critical stance’. Indeed, Lefebvre contends that most forms of representation, and visual modes in particular, trade in the same kinds of abstraction, which entail the detachment of ‘pure form from its impure content– from lived time, everyday time’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Literature of Suburban ChangeNarrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America, pp. 161 - 207Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020