CHINA MIEVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET STATION
Pamukkale UniversityThe Institute of Social Sciences Doctoral Thesis
The Department of English Language and Literature PhD Programme
Özlem AKYOL
Supervisor
Assoc. Prof Dr. Şeyda SİVRİOĞLU
February 2019 DENİZLİ
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude and thanks to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof Dr. Şeyda SİVRİOĞLU, for her guidance and suggestions. Also, I specially thank to Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL and Assoc. Prof Dr. Meryem AYAN for their insights, comments, and invaluable advice during the PhD period. I am greatly indebted to my mother, my daughter and my son for their belief in me and for their moral support during my education. I owe special thanks to my friend, Ayşe ŞENSOY, who has always helped me through various phases of this journey.
Last but emphatically not least, I would like to thank to my husband, Tolga AKYOL, for the sacrifices he has made to support my education and the generous motivation he has given me throughout the production of this thesis.
ABSTRACT
ECOLOGICAL HETEROTOPIAS IN NEIL GAIMAN’S
NEVERWHERE AND CHINA MIEVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET
STATION
Akyol, Özlem PhD Thesis
The Department of English Language and Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof Dr. Şeyda SİVRİOĞLU
February 2019, VI+104 pages
This thesis aims to study the relation between ecology and the idea of heterotopia configured by Michel Foucault and how this relation is illustrated in contemporary urban fantasy. The idea of heterotopia is basically attributed to places of otherness which are defined as multi-layered, disturbing, incompatible and transforming. The study will focus on two pioneering works of the genre; Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) which widely explore the idea of heterotopia in their settings. Heterotopic places in these works provide a basis to analyse the controversial relation between human and nature within the wide borders of fantasy. This study endeavours to figure out in what way a place is ascribed heterotopic features by elements of fantasy in the selected novels and how these fantastic heterotopias function to illustrate the destructive power of human beings on environment. The aim of the present thesis is then to offer an insight into heterotopic dimensions of urban fantasy with reference to theories of ecocriticism.
ÖZET
NEIL GAIMAN’IN NEVERWHERE VE CHINA MIEVILLE’IN
PERDIDO STREET STATION ADLI ROMANLARINDA
EKOLOJİK
HETEROTOPYALAR
Akyol, Özlem Doktora Tezi
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü Tez Danışmanı: Doç. Dr. Şeyda SİVRİOĞLU
Şubat 2019, VI+104 sayfa
Bu tez, Michel Foucault tarafından yapılandırılan heterotopya fikri ile ekoeleştiri arasındaki ilişkiyi ve bu ilişkinin modern şehir fantezi yazınına nasıl yansıtıldığını konu edinir. Temelde heterotopya düşüncesi sürekli değişmekte olan, uyumsuz, rahatsız edici ve çok katmanlı olarak tanımlanan ötekileştirilmiş mekânlarla ilişkilendirilir. Çalışma, mekânlarında heterotopya kavramını oldukça fazla kullanmış ve bu türün önde gelen iki eseri olan Neil Gaiman’ın Neverwhere ve China Mieville’nin Perdido Street Station adlı romanlarına odaklanmaktadır. Bu romanlardaki heterotopik mekânlar fantezi yazınının geniş sınırları içerisinde insan ve doğa arasındaki çelişkili ilişkiyi analiz etmek için temel oluşturur. Bu çalışma adı geçen romanlardaki fantezi öğelerinin bir mekâna ne şekilde bir heterotopik özellik kazandırdığını ve bu fantastik heterotopyaların insanoğlunun çevre üzerindeki yıkıcı etkisini nasıl resmettiğini ortaya çıkarmaya çalışır. Bu tez, ekoeleştiri kuramının ışığında, modern şehir fantezisi yazının heterotopik boyutuna ışık tutmayı amaçlamaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Modern şehir fantezi yazını, ekoeleştiri, heterotopya, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TEZ ONAY SAYFASI ... i
PLAGIARISM ... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ... iii ABSTRACT ... iv ÖZET... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ... vi INTRODUCTION ... 1 CHAPTER 1 ECOCRITICISM: FROM ANTROPOCENTRISM TO ECOCENTRISM 1.1. Evaluation of Theory... 8
1.2. Theorizing Urban Ecocriticism. ... 15
1.3. When Ecocriticism Meets Urban Fantasy ... 19
CHAPTER 2 ECOLOGICAL HETEROTOPIAS IN URBAN FANTASY 2.1. Michel Foucault and the Idea of Heterotopia ... 22
2.2. When Ecocriticism Meets Foucauldian Heterotopias ... 28
2.3. The Idea of Heterotopia in Urban Fantasy ... 31
CHAPTER 3 ECOCRITICAL ANALYSIS OF NEIL GAIMAN’S NEVERWHERE Ecological Heterotopias in Neil Gaiman’s London Below ... 35
CHAPTER 4 ECOCRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CHINA MIEVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET STATION Ecological Heterotopias in China Mieville’s New Crobuzon ... 57
CONCLUSION...86
REFERENCES...94
INTRODUCTION
This thesis explores through ecocritical lenses the idea of heterotopia and how urban fantasy genre reflects this issue in an attempt to illustrate the effect of exploitative human practices on ecological degradation. Before being configured by Michel Foucault, the heterotopia used to be only a medical term which refers to the displacement of an organ from its normal position. (Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, 857) However, in 1967, Foucault used the term in a lecture to propose his new ideas and ways of thinking about space. The manuscript of the lecture which was released into the public domain in 1984 has progressively attracted scholars from different fields related to spatial issues. Heterotopias which are etymologically linked to utopias are real places that exist like “counter-sites,” (Foucault, 1967: 16) simultaneously representing, contesting, and inverting all traditional sites whereas utopias are unreal, fantastic and perfected spaces. This study discusses in two selected novels how the idea of heterotopia from ecocritical stance is specifically explored in contemporary urban fantasy. Therefore, each chapter will explore the different principles of heterotopia in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000). These novels basically treat the nature culture opposition and the consequences of human intervention in nature. The representation of these subjects in the novels indicates the idea that human dependence on other non-human entities is indisputable and accordingly offers an insight for sustainable urban ecologies. As a consequence of human induced degradation in nature, culture creates heterotopias in which this degradation is illustrated more comprehensively in comparison with non-heterotopic spaces. In this context, the novels show how environmental degradation which is portrayed through different heterotopias changes the panorama of urban spaces and also help the reader to make assumptions about further consequences of this degradation. The aim of this thesis is to account for the environmental consequences of the nature culture opposition and anthropocentric practices through heterotopic spaces located in urban sites.
In addition, the thesis basically employs the theories of urban ecocriticism proposed and developed by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague and also the principles of Foucauldian heterotopia. The thesis is organized into four chapters. The first chapter accounts for not only theoretical part but also how to deploy the theory into urban fantasy. The next chapter elucidates the idea of heterotopia and the correlation of
this idea with ecological studies. In the last two chapters, the focus is on contemporary urban fantasy novels Neverwhere and Perdido Street Station in which setting engenders a shift away from conventional ecocritical analysis towards a new paradigm for ecocriticism based on heterotopias. The last two chapters thematically overlap in such issues like waste disposal problem, pollution and hybridisation which are consequences of anthropocentrism and the nature culture opposition. The thesis proposes that these two prominent urban fantasy novelists, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville remap the urban by creating heterotopias with contaminated ecologies in Neverwhere and Perdido
Street Station, respectively. Through ecocritical lenses, these novels, which illustrate
different alternate worlds, basically attempt to elaborate the major conflict between culture and nature. These novelists, who do not basically write with ecological concerns, manage to draw attention to the environmental danger embedded in the texts. Both novelists create the alternate worlds inspired by London as the setting which immediately connotes the urbanization period after the Industrial Revolution. They both use the setting as a tool to relate political, social, ethical, environmental and scientific issues, which amplifies the role of setting and somehow makes it an independent character in the texts. Furthermore, the thesis brings a new dimension to the idea of heterotopia by integrating heterotopic principles with ecologically contaminated spaces. This is an exceptional integration since the idea of heterotopia has been frequently identified with political discourse. However, considering that ecocriticism is also political with its activist role related to raise awareness for global ecological crisis, the integration of the idea of heterotopia and ecological stance will engender a new paradigm for the theory. Hence, the idea of heterotopia is reconceptualised to address the nature culture opposition and the anthropocentric practices with regard to the alternate spaces and species in the novels. Gaiman and Mieville create alternate worlds in which environmental contamination is illustrated through heterotopias, and thus offer a new literary definition for the idea of heterotopia in contemporary urban fantasy.
The main question here that this thesis will initially pose is what the place of urban studies in the scope of ecocriticism is? To answer this question three main names are worth mentioning; Michael Bennet, David W. Teague and Lawrence Buell. Although the need to integrate urban studies into ecological researches on a theoretical level has been foregrounded for a long time, it is only with the pioneering studies of Bennett, Teague and Buell that the urban is involved in ecocritical studies. Bennett and
Teague remark the general tendency to exclude urban spaces from many ecocritical projects and moreover argue for the necessity of “remind[ing] city dwellers of our placement within ecosystems and the importance of this fact for urban life and culture” (1999: 6). Likewise, Buell insists on a change of attention to “the interdependence between urban and outback landscape, and the traditions of imagining them” (2001: 8). On this view, involving urban studies into ecocriticism engenders an essential shift from the ecological thinking based on the image of ideal nature to a new paradigm into which urban studies pave the way for an unbiased engagement with urban and humanized nature. Engagement is key point here; ecocriticism has so far left out the controversial issue of human involvement with nature. In urban ecocriticism, however, nature is defined through human experience and engagement. For Urban ecocritics, urbanization is not a line which makes clear cut distinctions between nature and human but rather it is a process through which new and more complicated relationships of society and nature are formed. As Roger Keil, an expert on urban studies, points out “All natural relations now seem to be produced inside the reach of social activity” (2003: 729). As far as urban spaces are concerned, it is inevitable not to engage with the idea of heterotopia within the new spatial criteria.
In an effort to reveal the relation of ecology with the idea of heterotopia and its representation in contemporary urban fantasy, first of all, it will be useful to ask some preliminary questions related to this issue: How do the novels situate the elements of fantasy to the heterotopic spaces? To what extend the heterotopias contribute to underscore the environmental degradation? Is it possible to claim that these novels contain environmental predicament through the alternate worlds they have depicted? In an attempt to corroborate these questions, the thesis explores the principles of heterotopia in the environmentally contaminated spaces assuming that this will bring a new paradigm to contemporary urban fantasy and ecocriticism as well.
Firstly, it will be essential to explain how the idea of heterotopia has evolved so far. After the Second World War, under the transformational effect of post colonialism, globalization and ever more advanced information technologies, space begins to redefine itself in critical theory as traditional spatial and geographic depictions are blurred, erased or remade. Therefore, it is quite impossible to mention a mere apprehension of unchanging spatial criteria and static reading of topological data. In this context, starting with the point that everything is now relative even absolute ones, critics
and theorists develop a new interpretive and critical model to analyse this currently emerged multifaceted space phenomena. Starting from this point of view, Michel Foucault’s idea of “heterotopia” comes to the scene to elaborate spaces of multiplicity and constant change. He uses the term for real or unreal counter spaces which are relational, juxtaposed and liminal. Foucault claims heterotopias are “singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of the others” (1982: 252).
Heterotopias are usually shocking with its potential to challenge fixed and predetermined orders. Foucault underlines the disturbing nature of heterotopias by asserting “[they] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (1970: xviii). Having a ground-breaking structure, heterotopias give a peculiar point of view to environmental issues. For ecocritics “space is an abstract idea when compared with bounded and humanly meaningful notion of place” (Buell, 2005: 145). This abstraction is well fitted to the concept of heterotopia which reorients the way we perceive the functions of particular spaces, human, non-human relations and power dynamics attributed to these spaces. Highlighting this point, Ralph Pordzik also remarks about the concept of heterotopia as a new way of thinking outside the stereotypes of utopian and dystopian spaces. According to him, having both utopian and dystopian features heterotopias are something different in a way that they create “pluriverse” (2001: 5), a kind of alternative meaning attributed to really existing places. A “pluriverse” distorts the common idea of universe by celebrating fragmented and post structural way of thinking of subjectivity. Therefore, this thesis mainly focuses on specific ways of creating heterotopic environments claiming that contemporary urban fantasy presents highly effective panorama of human destructiveness in alternate spaces. As can be seen in relation to the above reflections, ecocriticism seeks for a new way of thinking to account for consequences of the natural destruction and human beings’ impact on environment. Also, it offers possible solutions to environmental degradation. In order to fulfil this aim, an ecocritical study disconnects the reader from the culturally and socially constructed systems of thought and establish a new relation between the reader and the natural world. Likewise, contemporary urban fantasy disconnects the reader’s relation with apparent reality and instead, it presents alternative worlds in which new creatures, new heroes, new villains, new atrocities and new wars
are introduced. Imagination manages to raise awareness showing that there are infinite numbers of possibilities to create a new way of thinking whereas the reality cannot realize this since it has been already restricted by cultural, political, religious, scientific and social paradigms. In doing so, the contemporary fantasy literature leads people to step outside of prescribed and anthropocentric structure of knowledge but instead into new and unrestricted mode of experience. Christopher Brawley refers to this idea as “a shift from an anthropocentric paradigm to an ecocentric or biocentric paradigm” (2008: 294). This is a key point where ecocriticism and fantasy literature meet.
In this context, contemporary urban fantasy mostly aims to depict potential future and spaces for humans or non-humans on the planet. In terms of creating alternative spaces and time, the genre is full-compatible with ecological studies. To create alternative spaces and time, it employs implications of future technology and supernatural figures from mythology and fairy tales. The fusion of the ancient and the future melted within limitless framework of imagination causes the emergence of extraordinary as well as dramatic concept of space. Ecologically speaking, these spaces create an opportunity to unfold catastrophic consequences of human destructiveness on environment. In this thesis, such urban spaces with their own heterotopic structure will be at the target of ecocriticsm. The novels to be analysed have been accordingly selected on the grounds that they are pioneering works of contemporary urban fantasy.
Within this theoretical framework, this thesis is planned to consist of four main chapters. The first chapter will cover theoretical background about the waves of ecocriticism and its evolution into truly transdisciplinary field especially focusing on urban ecocriticism and its representation in contemporary urban fantasy genre. The second chapter will shed light on the idea of heterotopia coined by Foucault and representation of this idea in ecocritical theory as well as in contemporary urban fantasy. The third chapter elaborates on Neil Gaiman’s ecological attitude in his oeuvre, and analyses Neverwhere in ecological context, exploring how heterotopic spaces are detailed in contemporary urban fantasy and discusses how these fantastic heterotopias reflect the environmental contamination in the novel. The novel is set in an alternate world situated just beneath London. The idea of subterranean city is not new as Alice Jenkins claims “Places beneath the surface of quotidian life are invested by many fantasy narratives with a peculiar richness of space and time” (2006: 32). In this context,
Below” which is full of myths, creatures and uncanny repositioning of existing buildings. Gaiman’s fantasy is not an escape from reality but rather in constant interaction with it. He takes existing topological structure of London underground and defamiliarizes it ending up with emergence of many heterotopic spaces. Thus, the novel includes several spaces echoing Foucaldian heterotopias by juxtaposing some certain spaces in “London Below” and in “London Above.” Each of these heterotopias indicates a different environmental issue which will be respectively problematized in this thesis. As a result, Neverwhere, exemplifies ecological heterotopias illustrated in contemporary urban fantasy, which raises awareness about human induced reasons for environmental contamination.
The last chapter critically focuses on ecological heterotopias in Perdido Street
Station within social and political contexts and discusses how China Mieville engages
with the environmental effects of pollution, waste disposal, hybridization and atom bomb in his own created world, New Crobuzon. This chapter delves into the analysis of scientific, social and ecological issues in this fantastic city which is a chaotic representation of Victorian London by bringing weird relation between nature and culture into forefront. New Crobuzon contains multifarious and hybrid spaces in which industrial technology and alchemical sorcery overlap. The focus is on the protagonist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, who is in a constant conflict with authorities and the crime boss of the city. Not only Isaac but all the characters in the novel are depicted in various heterotopias each of which provides a new experience for ecological reading. This new experience reveals that culture and nature are dependent on each other and the former is embedded within the later regardless of what extend transformed and contaminated it might be.
All in all, this thesis foregrounds the need to integrate urban and ecological studies based on the idea that modern humans are still born with a predisposition to like or prefer certain features common to natural but not to urban or other built environments. (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989) As theorized form of this integration, urban ecocriticism offers new ideas about environmental issues. In this sense, contemporary urban fantasy is a compatible platform to explore these ideas. Contemporary urban fantasy urges the reader to embrace a new way of thinking by disconnecting him from socially and culturally constructed system of thought that is grounded in the culture and nature opposition. As Chris Baratta indicates “[…] fantasy literature has been the one of
the beneficiaries of the emergence of ecocriticism” (2012: 2). What categorizes a text into the fantasy genre is usually its tendency to create alternate spaces. Therefore, as well as utopias and dystopias, much more complex and interesting form of space, heterotopias also start to appear in the genre. They are spaces which reorient the way of thinking about human and non-human relations and also power dynamics of society. The selected novels, in this sense, aim to underscore ecological interaction between idea of heterotopia and urban fantasy. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that ecological heterotopias, as explored in these novels, challenge the traditional opposition between nature and culture and fundamentally reveal the role of anthropocentrism in environmental contamination.
CHAPTER I
ECOCRITICISM: FROM ANTROPOCENTRISM TO ECOCENTRISM
1.1. Evolution of the Theory
Since the ancient times, ecology, the study of environment, has been present in social, literary and scientific works. The ecological studies have been greatly under the effect of philosophical, cultural and scientific changes occurred in different centuries. Some important events like the Industrial Revolution led people to change their perception on ecology. It is believed that the Agricultural Revolution is a threshold which reorients the perception about ecology. Especially in America and Britain, the 18th and 19th centuries were the time period of significant agricultural development marked by new farming techniques and inventions. This led to massive increase in food production. This agricultural growth created a ripple effect that spread throughout other countries. From then on, people were able to leave their farms and move into cities since there was sufficient agricultural production to support a life away from the farm. The conveniences of city life created a demand for other products such as clothing or non-essential items that improve the quality of life. Accordingly, new systems and technologies were invented to meet these newly emerged demands, which results in the first industrial factories. This necessitates immediate immigration into cities in great numbers to find employment in factories. This also ushered in the Industrial Revolution and correspondingly, fast growing urbanisation period. People who have been spatially alienated from nature started to feel a kind of domination over nature. This is the threshold that accelerated the anthropocentric point of view. This egocentric perception brings about colossal damage on environment and greater threat like global warming. So, there appears a kind of reaction from scientists and as well as literary and cultural critics. In literary world, the reaction to the anthropocentric attitude has found voice and body through “ecocriticism.” The term was first coined by William Rueckert in his article entitled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The controversial relationship between human beings and nature is underlined by Rueckert who points out “the problem now, as most ecologists agree, is to find ways of keeping the human community from destroying the natural community, and with it the human
community. This is what ecologists like to call the self-destructive or suicidal motive that is inherent in our prevailing and paradoxical attitude toward nature” (1978: 108).
Before starting to explore the main principles of the theory, it is necessary to take a close look into the origin of the term which traces back to the Ancient Greek language. Derived from the Greek word “oikos” which means house, dwelling place or habitation, and “kritos” which means judge, “ecocriticism” literally comes to mean “house judge” (Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 2002: 145). This derivation from Greek is expanded by William Howarth who states an ecocritic is “a person who judges the merits and faults of writings that depicts the effects of culture upon nature, with a view toward celebrating nature, berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through political action” (1996: 69). This definition based upon the Greek root of the term not only reveals the role of ecocritic but also it offers a new perception for nature in human history. This point of view is adopted by various thinkers and critics who have used different approaches and accordingly they interpret the term variously in their own fields of study. Their common focus, however, is onto the relation of man and nature. Therefore, it could be concluded that ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment conducted by interdisciplinary point of views which host various sciences gathered to analyse the environment, and it is expected to find possible solutions for contemporary environmental problems.
Ecocriticism was widely known by the publication of two primary works, The
Enviromental Imagination (1995) by Lawrence Buell and The Ecocriticism Reader
(1996) by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Cheryll Glotfelty known the pioneer of ecocriticism in the United States of America asserts:
Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies (1996: 18).
In her work, Glotfelty claims that in the postmodern age, the main concern of literature must “redraw the boundaries” or “remap” the scope of the literary studies. Similarly, being well aware of the emergent ecological threat, Lawrence Buell pays great attention
to raise environmental awareness through literary and cultural criticism. When defining ecocriticism Buell asserts that it is a “study of relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (1995: 430). On the contrary to some scholars who find ecocriticism too doctrinaire, Buell postulates that the theory is thoroughly practicable and regarding life itself. His work thus becomes the primary source for ecocriticism.
Human being’s everlasting attempt to master over nature unfolds the long-lasting distinction between nature and culture. Man has come to agree his weakness against nature as a result of his recurrently failed attempts to establish superiority. “Culture may be viewed as an agent that actively strives for domination over nature, or as a malicious tumour that tends to grow and exceed the limits set by nature. Nature may be regarded as a source of hardships and catastrophes that needs to be mastered by human rational action or, alternatively, as benign providence that offers advice” (Haila, 2000: 155). Upon realizing this weakness man strives to divert his powers as Horald Fromm states:
The idealized emphasis on “rational” in the concept of man as the rational animal which characterized Platonic-Christian thought for two millennia had generally been the product of man’s sense of his own physical weakness, his knowledge that Nature could not be tamed or bent to his own will. In lieu of the ability to mold Nature to serve his own ends, man had chosen to extol and mythify that side of his being that seemed to transcend Nature by inhabiting universes of thought that Nature could not naysay (1978: 30).
Although there seems to exist an eternal conflict between nature and culture they cannot be thought as contrasting separate units. Otherwise, as William Howarth suggests “they constantly mingle, like water and soil in a flowing stream” (1996: 69). As a matter of fact, the interaction between nature and culture forms the basis of ecocriticism. Glotfelty makes a connection between nature and culture. She describes ecocriticism as:
Despite the broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication, an ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture. Understanding how nature and culture constantly influence and construct each other is essential to an informed ecocriticism. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land. As a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human (1996: xix).
The attitude towards nature and its relation with culture vary as the theory has gone through various phases since the time of its emergence. To draw a clear cut borders for these phases is quite impossible however, as Lawrence Buell states in “The Future of Environmental Criticism” there are waves which have no definite distinctions, yet whose peculiar characteristics can be observed. Therefore, Buell accordingly calls these waves as “palimpsests” (2005: 17) with regard to their interaction with each other. The multi-layered structure of the theory is also adopted by Scott Slovic who asserts that using wave metaphor is more appropriate to indicate a thought which is connected to one another than to order categories with clear-cut boundaries. He states that “[…] it’s simply more difficult to visualize multiple layers of scholarly habits than it is to imagine successive waves rolling ashore from the sea of ecocritical ideas” (2010: 5). These ideas from two prominent ecocritics reveal that the successive waves or palimpsests in ecocriticism exist to fulfil the requirements of cultural and social changes which are impossible to think independently.
Theoretically speaking, there are three waves of ecocriticism which help to understand the evolutionary track of the theory. In the mid-1990s, the first phase also known as the first wave appears to highlight the relationship of mankind with the natural world. In this phase, ecocriticism is perceived as a way through which the preservation of the earth is possible (Buell, 2005: 21). Bearing this explanation in mind, the mission of an ecocritic in the first wave is, as Willliam Howarth states, to evaluate “the effects of culture upon nature, with a view toward celebrating nature, berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through political action” (1996: 69). The first wave ecocritics specifically focus on such issues like “nature writing, nature poetry and wilderness fiction” (ibid., 138). In this phase, the main goal of the theory is “to contribute to the struggle to preserve the biotic community” (Coupe, 2000: 4). As such, on the contrary to its successor, the first wave insists upon the cultural distinction between human and nature specifically, speaking for nature.
The second wave is specifically reforms the long-standing distinctions between human and non-human, questioning these very concepts. (Garrard, 2004: 7) Instead of these distinctions, the second wave ecocritics adopt a holistic approach meaning that every organism, whether human or non-human, is a part of total organisation. As Buell points the second wave explores the environmental issues from organicist perception which has a doctrine that every unit in nature has an organic basis and therefore they are
part of an organic whole. (Buell, 2005: 135) Moreover, the second wave is usually considered as ecological engagement with cultural studies. At the end of the twentieth century, the ecocriticism evolves into the critical study of various literary genres from nature writing. The second wave ecocriticism attempts to manifest the environmental issues from the perception of different literary genres and expand the scope of the criticism from American or British focus to different cultures. Out of this expansion, the ecojustice movement has emerged as one of the more political of ecocriticism branches that is “raising an awareness of class, race, and gender through ecocritical reading of text” (Bressler, 1999: 236). As a heterogeneous movement, as Buell argues, the theory more concentrates “on locating vestiges of nature within cities and/or exposing crimes of eco injustice against society’s marginal groups” (2005: 24). Similarly, Slovic also comments:
Circa 1995, though, some distinctly new tendencies became commonplace in Anglophone ecocriticism: the study of multiple literary genres (no longer so much focus on nonfiction) and the development of “green cultural studies” (exceeding the boundaries of literature per se); an attention to the artistic representation of environmental conditions and experiences of various cultural groups around the world (such as Japanese environmental literature and Mexican-American writing about nature); the emergence of environmental justice ecocriticism; and a new attention to urban and suburban experience, not just the valorisation of wilderness (2010: 6).
It is of importance to underline the difference between the first and the second wave. As Buell comments, in the first wave, the perception of environment as nature and nature writing may restrict the subject. Instead, it is needed to have a more advanced perception of environment whose scope is widened from outback to metropolis and which involves in both anthropocentric and biocentric views. (2005) This revisionist new stance of the second wave extends the ecocritical scope towards a more critical exploration of environmentally important social issues.
The theory evolves into the last phase known as “the third wave” still holding various implications of the first and second waves. The tendency of the theory to engage with other cultural studies frequently observed in the second wave is expanded in the third wave. As Serpil Oppermann remarks “The recent developments in the field indicate the emergence of a third wave which accounts for ecocriticism’s transcendences of geopolitical borders to assume truly global status” (2011: 14). Also,
Scott Slovic states that the scope of the third wave is “toward a more comparative, trans-cultural approach to ecocritical studies” (2010: 6). This transculture and global attitude of the theory supports the idea that human beings are originated from the same ecologic construction regardless of considering their ethical differences and various reactions they may give towards environmental issues. On commenting on the multicultural and multinational structure of the theory, Lawrence Buell asserts that “it makes sense that the reach of ecocriticism - the omnibus term by which the new polyform literature and environment studies movement has come to be labelled, especially in the United States - should extend from the oldest surviving texts to works of the present moment” (2001: 2-3).
Especially with the introduction of the third wave, the focus of ecocriticism which is mostly on British and American literary works has shifted to the literature of different nations or ethnicities. George B. Handley, who claims that the scope of the theory should transcend the borders of America and England, insists upon remapping of the theory in his book entitled New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination
of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. He anticipates that literary criticism in the America
desperately needs comparative studies of how ideas have moved across borders, how they have appeared with a kind of inexplicable transnational simultaneity, or how their diverse locations in the America have perpetually transformed their ideological function. Moreover, ideas can serve for ideological as well as ethical or aesthetic purposes, particularly when we shift from a merely social or political analysis to an ecocritical consideration of the impact of an idea on the natural world within a particular context (2010: 32).
The third wave, thus, aims at exploring the new national literatures’ different approaches towards environment and finding out the interaction among these approaches. The study of other national literatures such as Japanese, Indian or Australian from the ecocritical perception first “recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint” (Adamson and Slovic, 1999: 6-7). The expansion of the theory coincides with the early beginning of the second millennium when more people become conscious about ecological contamination and depletion of natural sources resulting in catastrophic consequences. Both regionally and globally environmental studies attempt to raise awareness about the
apocalyptic end of the planet. Concerning the interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transnational structure of the theory, Glen A. Love also indicates:
[…] western American literature is not unique in its ecological perspective and that we need to recognize our kinship with nature-oriented writers in New England, in Canada, in Europe, in South and Central America, in Africa, in Australia, everywhere. Ecological issues are both regional and global. They transcend political boundaries. What is required is more interdisciplinary scholarship and more inter-regional scholarship on common issues (1990: 212).
Ecocriticism with such postmodern features contains many ideas originated from cultural and literary studies, sociology, psychology, environmental ethics, history, eco-philosophy, geography, animal studies and other academic domains. This sophisticated engagement of ecocriticism has led to emergence of “postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice ecocriticism, urban ecocriticism, and the new feminist ecocritical studies as the new entryways” (Oppermann, 2011: 16). Such taxonomy of ecocriticism necessitates the emergence of new conceptualizations. The third wave ecocriticism with multiple socio-cultural context and considerably diverse fields of study has a remarkable analogy with the poly phonic structure of post modernism. This analogy is best epitomised with the concept of rhizome which Deluze and Guattari coined in their ground breaking work entitled A Thousand Plateaus to explore the idea of multiplicities. As Deluze and Guattari indicate the rhizome’s characteristics, “such as the principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and a signifying rapture” (1987: 7-9) directly refer to the transdisciplinary structure of ecocriticism. The picture that ecocriticism currently draws resembles “the processes of heterogenesis” (Guattari, 2000: 34). He uses this term to indicate “a becoming that is always in the process of adapting, transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment” (ibid., 95). Accordingly, “ecocriticism is increasingly transforming and modifying itself in its pluralist orientations” (Oppermann, 2011: 17). Consequently, it should be noted that ecocriticism, like other critical approaches that preceded it, both sustains its existence as an individual field of literary study and also continues to integrate many critical studies with the urge of changing the world toward the recovery of spoilt urban areas and decayed countryside.
1.2. Theorizing Urban Ecocriticism
Many scholars in the field have already accepted that ecocriticism has extended beyond its initial concern with nature and non-fiction nature writing to integrate wider range of environments and text. As Lawrence Buell asserts, the second-wave ecocriticism has also “taken the movement in a more sociocentric direction” (2005: 138). Accordingly, the last decades have seen variety of ecocritical subject matters ranging from environmental justice to postcolonial environments, from ecophobia as Simon Estok discussed in his article entitled “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness” to the garbage and waste issue treated in 2013 ISLE conference as an environmental subject. Despite this diversity, ecoritics have failed in productively engaging with urbanized environments because only a few ecocritics believe it is possible to imagine nature embedded into an urban space. Furthermore, many ecocritical works have a bias towards urban nature. Some of them implicitly avoid the possibilities of urban nature whereas some explicitly doubt the existence of urban nature. John Tallmadge claims that city stands for “absence” (2004: 111) is an exact example of the latter. On the other hand, Buell starts to realize that it is the time to mention integrating urban space with nature when he notes that “we are starting to see the beginning of incorporation of urban and other severely altered, damaged landscapes “brownfields” as well as “greenfields” into ecocriticism’s accounts of placeness and place-attachment” (2005: 88). Other scholars in the field Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw argue “the production of the city through socio-environmental changes results in the continuous production of new urban natures of new urban, social and physical environmental processes” (2006: 4). Broadening limits of ecocriticism through urban studies thus results in reconciling perspective “which embraces conflict and is open to the possibilities that non-traditional natural environments offer human nature connection and reconnection” (Bracke, 2013: 11).
Principally based on the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and environment, ecocriticism, then, start to include urban spaces into the theory as they are indispensable part of ecosystem. Analysis of urban life and urban settings from eceocritical point of view leads to expansion of the theory including social and political concerns. This phase of ecoriticism defined as “cultural criticism engaged with urban ecology” (Bennett, 2001: 296) is named as urban ecocriticism. Although ecocritics have emphasized the necessity of integrating urban life and ecological studies on a theoretical
level, relatively few works have emerged until the studies of Michael Bennett’s and David W. Teague’s In the Nature of Cities or Lawrence Buell’s Writing for an
Endangered World that the urban is started to be included by ecocritical scholars. In the
former work, Teague and Bennett lay emphasis on the need to “remind city dwellers of [their] placement within ecosystems and the importance of this fact for urban life and culture” (1999: 6). Buell, also, argues for the necessity of shifting attention to “the interdependence between urban and outback landscape, and the traditions of imagining them” (2001: 8). Urban ecocriticism argues for “the whole idea of nature as something separate from human experience is a lie. Humans and nature construct one other” (Wilson, 1992: 13). In this sense, expansion of the theory into urban studies brings about a shift. Ecocriticism is usually in the pursuit of the image of an ideal nature, even if this idea has become unattainable, whereas urban studies offer a full and unbiased engagement with urban nature populated with human beings with variety of possibilities these spaces offer. The underlying reason for this shift is completely scientific.
For a long time in history, human impact on ecological systems has been comparatively limited in comparison with non-human influence on natural process. Today, however, it is undeniable that human beings affect ecosystems to a large extent through modification of energy flow and nutrient cycles (Vitousek et al., 1997, Grimm et al., 2000), disruption of hydrological processes (Arnold, Gibbons, 1996), alteration of habitats and species composition (McKinney, 2002), conversion of land and resource consumption (Turner et al., 1991). Human beings also influence evolutionary processes by increasing extinctions of other species in relatively higher rate than non-human causes. Taking account of all the data, ecological scholars no longer believe that ecosystems are closed and self-regulating entities. Instead, ecosystems are mostly driven and regulated by external forces. This new ecological paradigm recognizes that humans are components of ecosystem (McDonnell, 1993). This participation is considerably evident in urban spaces. Although such spaces only cover a moderate portion of Earth’s surface, they have extraordinarily large ecological effects on ecosystems. Moreover, the increase in urban population becomes quite observable day by day. It is estimated that by 2030, more than 60 % of the world population will live in cities which also means one in every three people will be living in urban areas (United Nations, 2016: ii).
In the context of this new ecological paradigm, urban spaces are located at the heart of ecological studies, which gives an acceleration to urban ecology studies. The
idea of bringing urban studies and nature together is propounded by Bennett who tries to find an answer for the question of “Is there such a thing as ‘urban nature’” (1998: 49). He aims to justify the vision of an ecocriticism that mingles a traditional focus on wild nature with the diverse ecology of urban environment. The idea of “urban nature” is then conceptualized by Ashton Nichols who is a scholar on contemporary ecocriticism and nature writing. He argues for replacing the romantic idea of nature with a new idea and a new word, “Urbanature” suggesting that “all human and non-human lives, as well as all animate and inanimate objects around those lives, are linked in a complex web of interdependent interrelatedness” (2011: xiii). Based on these ideas, urban ecocriticism explores the city as a local ecosystem with its cultural and natural dimensions and studies the “dynamic interactions among socioeconomic and biophysical forces” (Alberti, et al., 2008: 1169). The publications of two works entitled “Terraforming for Urbanists” by Ursula K. Heise and Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and
Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture by Christopher Schliephake have
recently come out to correlate literary and cultural text with urban ecology. Both scholars try to create conceptual models to erase the long standing image of city as “an antithesis to nature or a biological wasteland” and, instead, visualize it “as itself a form of nature” (Heise, 2016: 11). Schliephake, similarly, envisions a specific perception for urban ecology that deconstructs the city-nature binary and instead offers a new city image which goes beyond the perception of city as “some strange other, an ugly concrete stain on an otherwise beautiful landscape” (2016: xvi).
Urban ecocriticism examines literary works involving experiences of city dwellers and their complex relationship with “urbanized nature” (Oppermann 2012: 1) in various spaces of a city. Cities host peculiar type of biodiversity which allows for ecocritical analysis. This biodiversity is formed up by a complex ecosystem that incorporates with all animate units in urban spaces. Urban ecologists’ main objective is to pose the question of “how do humans interacting with their biophysical environment generate emergent collective behaviours (of humans and other species, and the system themselves) in urbanizing landscapes?” (Alberti, et al., 2008: 1176). Urban ecology defines city as a massive biological organism of which perpetuation is provided by the interaction between human and ecology. It is generally assumed that a region is usually mapped by non-human determiners. However, human interference should not be ignored since human beings play an important role in changing flora and fauna of the place in which they inhabit.
Ecocritics claim that urbanization makes nature, though not intentionally, part of the urban landmark, yet by altering its original state. This idea has led to raise variety of questions. “How does urbanization transform the experience and conceptualizations of place? How does literature respond to the behaviour of humans in urbanized landscapes, or to the complex interactions of human-natural systems in metropolitan areas?” (Oppermann, 2012: 2). In this sense, the transformation of urban spaces caused by urbanization and human impact on ecosystem form the basis of urban ecocriticism. Urban ecocritics mostly involve in “theorizing literary paradigms of geographical memory, identity, and language with regard to urbanized human emplacement” (ibid.). As Rose and Bennett indicate urban ecocriticism mainly engages with the interactions between nature and the city, likening the city to jungle inhabited by the wild life of urban dwellers (1999: 20-1).
Over construction, pollution, overuse of natural sources, waste disposal, overpopulation and insufficient infrastructure are all among the main concerns of urban ecology and to analyse the representation of these issues in literary works is the primary objective of urban ecocriticism. Literary works provide us with variety of examples about how all these environmental problems in urban spaces are experienced and how all these experiences are reacted by city dwellers. To identify urban studies with the question of ecology and accordingly with urban ecocriticism is essential. On considering growing human population in cities and the fact that this population has a significant effect on organic and inorganic foundations of life, it is inevitable not to locate urban studies at the core of ecocriticism in which nature is defined through human experience and engagement. To put it differently, urban ecocriticism paves the way to develop a mind-set that “cities do not obliterate nature; they transform it, producing a characteristically urban natural environment” (Spirn, 1985: 42).
1.3. When Ecocriticism Meets Urban Fantasy
Fantasy genre which covers variety of texts from Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland to Dracula has so many sub-genres that overlap, interact each other and
evolve into new sub-genres day by day. Urban fantasy is one of these sub-genres which has gained popularity within the last two or three decades. When Brian Attebery accounts for the term “indigenous fantasy” as the one which is “adapted to and reflective of its native environment” (1992: 129), he has also referred to essentials of urban fantasy. Simultaneously, the early 1990s saw the publications of classical urban fantasy novels of prominent authors like Charles De Lint, Emma Bull, Tim Powers, and Peter Beagle. In urban fantasy, it is essential to set the narrative into an urban area. Setting, in this sense, has an active part to play in narratives; initiating actions, manipulating characters, or altering the tone rather than being a mere backdrop. Settings created in urban fantasy are usually real and familiar. This makes the genre more relatable, but subversive and uncanny, as well. The sub-genre usually features supernatural societies, paranormal politics, vampires, werewolves, mythological characters, and also romantic relations between creatures of all kinds. Urban fantasy has a great deal of features in common with horror and crime narratives. Although the genre involves a remarkable generic fluidity, there are two elements that have never changed; engaging with supernatural or fantastic elements and setting the narrative into an urban space.
Therefore, reading an urban fantasy narrative is a new way of experiencing reality and also, from ecological point of view, it allows readers to see some environmental problems related to urban areas in more exaggerated and complicated way. The representation of these problems in urban fantasy, thus, has the potential to forecast environmental problems which might happen in future. Fantasy literature has more holistic attitude about environment by simply decentring human and instead creating non-human characters that have agency. In this sense, American iconic author in fantasy literature, Ursula Le Guin juxtaposes fantasy and nature when she writes “Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion” (2004: 144-5). She claims that the most essential characteristic of fantasy literature is its engagement with the non-anthropocentric. She therefore asserts that “realistic fiction is drawn towards anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it” (2007: 87). Echoing Le Guin,
the British science fiction writer, Brian Stableford proposes that “most futuristic fantasies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries […] accepted the notion that the most fundamental social evil […] was the abstraction of human beings from a supposedly harmonious relationship with the natural environment and its inherent rhythms” (2010: 266). Fantasy literature blurs the line between human and non-human and poses a challenge for human’s egocentric perception of the world. Chris Brawley, in his recent book, claims that “the feeling of awe which is experienced in a fantasy has the ability to reshape our perception of the natural world and can challenge us to rethink our relations with the natural world” (2014: 6). Another critic Don D. Elgin also makes a connection between ecocriticism and fantasy literature in his books entitled The
Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel. He argues that
“literature, particularly the fantasy novel, offers humanity a way to reintegrate itself into the natural world and, in so doing, invites a new relationship between itself, its fellow creatures, and the science and literature that create and mirror that world” (1985: 30). All these authors and critics have a common point which claims that fantasy literature allows for perceiving the world in more ecocentric way.
Fantasy literature’s tendency to shift power paradigms and to create alternative worlds in which agency is transferred from human to non-human gives the reader a chance to juxtapose his own life and the world illustrated in such narratives. In doing so, the reader is exposed to a world different from his own, different relationships, perspectives, morals and cultures. This exposition cannot only raise his awareness for ecology but also move his view on human being’s place in the world towards somewhere beyond anthropocentrism. Fantasy literature contributes a lot to this process with its subversive plot structure, extraordinary character formation and creation of alternate worlds as its setting. “Engaging imaginatively with the environment helps us to lift the veil of familiarity” as Brawley accordingly states (2014: 30). Fantasy literature specifically urban fantasy focuses on agency of setting and the non-human. It not only questions the dominancy of human beings over the non-human and also suggests alternative relations between human and the non-human. In the age of Anthropocene when the non-human is mostly ignored and substantially devalued, an attempt to change the current paradigm is a bit challenging but quite promising from the environmental point of view. Setting a new paradigm which is determined by the controversial relation between human and the non-human is considered as a way to
mitigate the current environmental problems and prevent the ones that may happen in future.
CHAPTER II
ECOLOGICAL HETEROTOPIAS IN URBAN FANTASY
2.1. Michel Foucault and the Idea of Heterotopia
“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.” (Foucault, 1967: 14)
The concept of heterotopia coined by Michel Foucault appeared in 1966 in his preface to Les Mots et les choses, later translated into English as The Order of Things (1970). From lexical point of view originally Greek word “hetero” comes to mean the other (of two) or different and “topia” directly refers to the word for space. Therefore, with the meaning of different place, heterotopias are usually identified multifarious and varied spaces. As Foucault claims when describing heterotopias “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1967: 3). The concept of heterotopia involves the idea that a single space could be formed up by multiple layers which have apparently incompatible in terms of spatiality and temporality. Foucault assets “heterotopias [are] those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others” (1982: 16). Social scientists and literary scholars have used the concept to identify spatial and temporal “otherness” in cultural productions “implying a systematic deviation from the topological norms prevailing in the built environment or metaphorically, in the literary artefacts of a particular culture” (Bouissac, 2013: 2).
Foucault makes a clear distinction when he says utopia is imaginary and usually better place whereas heterotopia is real place from the real world. The former involves consolation. In spite of their disconnectedness from the real world, its fully imaginary realm introduces us uniquely and superbly designed places, which makes the reader amazed, attached and satisfied at the end. The latter, however, is quite disturbing since it implicitly subverts the language by shattering or tangling the common names as well as destructing the syntax of the sentences. It not only damages the syntax with which we form sentences but also the one which causes words and things to hold together. Heterotopias “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our
sentences” (Foucault, 1970: xviii). For Foucault, sites of “otherness are spaces whose existence set up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate objects which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered. Heterotopias have a shocking effect that derives from their unusual mode of ordering” (Hetherington, 1997: 42).
In his famous 1967 Paris lecture “Of Other Spaces” Foucault starts his lecture by referring the dominant spatial issues in earlier ages. He asserts that the spatiality in medieval times completely depends on binary opposition such as “sacred places and profane places: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places” (1967: 22), which is a completely hierarchical division. On the grounds of Galileo’s radical discovery in astronomy Foucault points out that the space “of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved” turning into “infinitely open space” (ibid., 22) This evolution erases such kind of binaries as it is impossible exercise power in an infinite space. Instead, Foucault introduces the idea of heterotopia in which a wide range of placement can be defined. Foucault asserts:
The space in which we live draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light; we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another (ibid., 23).
To make “set of relations” more concrete Foucault gives the example of train through which one can move from one place to another then another. Heterotopias are places “that have the curious property of being in a relation with all the other site, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (ibid., 24). Heterotopias are heterogeneous places which are able to fuse the real and unreal. To clarify this idea, Foucault gives the example of mirror:
In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the
standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from that place where I am since I see myself over there (ibid., 24).
The virtual turns into the real through the heterotopic mirror. Physically and virtually existing mirror connects the image with its environment; namely the image is a reference to the reality of that space. The virtual image is connected to the real sites around it. Heterotopic mirror thus becomes a place which means “the articulation of relational performances” (Rose, 1999: 248).
Foucault specifies six principles about heterotopia. Firstly, every culture produces its own heterotopias. They can be in several forms. Therefore, it is impossible to mention a single type of heterotopia since it is “a constant of every human group” (Foucault, 1967: 24). In the first principle Foucault divides heterotopias into two; heterotopias of crisis are places where individuals experience a kind of liminality. They do not have the sense of belonging to any place. Boarding schools and army are the best examples for this kind. Students usually undergo a transition process from childhood to maturity there. For Foucault, heterotopias of crisis belong to primitive cultures and they are soon replaced by heterotopia of deviation that involves people who are deviated from the social norms of society like prisons, psychiatry clinics and retirement houses. Actually these heterotopias exist as control mechanism to make life possible for these people.
The second principle is that heterotopias have a function which can change throughout the history “for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, has one function and another” (ibid., 25). Cemeteries are places with a certain function in the society. Until the 18th century cemeteries had been sacred places located in town centres usually near churches. However, in the 19th century they were disgraced and moved out of the cities since people thought some illnesses could spread through dead bodies.
Thirdly, heterotopias can bring many incompatible units in one single place. In this context, Foucault gives the example of oriental garden. In this particular place, there are many plants taken from different parts of the world. The plants whose habitats and living conditions are “foreign to one another” (ibid., 25) are brought together in the garden. These heterotopias are condensed places where functionally and culturally incompatible units are gathered in a particular place. These heterotopias are relational
places “of dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined by the construction of new relations. It is always being made and is always therefore, in a sense, unfinished” (Massey, 2005: 111).
The fourth principle is about chronological classification of heterotopias. Foucault claims that heterotopic places are not linear but they are “linked to slices in time which is to say that they open onto what might be termed […] heterochrony” and heterotopias “begin to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (ibid., 26). Foucault’s time-wise distinction brings about two different heterotopias; on the one hand, there are the places accumulating and collecting time like museums and libraries and on the other hand, there are temporary places such as circus or fair place which are built, used and then become disused. Such heterotopias try to accumulate the fleeting time in an archive or attempt to revive an ancient tradition of carnival. Heterotopic places break with the traditional order in terms of space and time and this rapture is by caused the relational structure of such places.
As for the fifth principle, Foucault mentions about the publicness of places. Some places have “a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (ibid., 26). Closed places can be exemplified with prisons or barracks which have some certain rules about entering and leaving. Restricted areas are places such as baths or temples of which entrance requires to fulfil some certain rituals or ceremonies. One can enter heterotopic sites but actually his entry is only an illusion “we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded” (ibid., 26-7).
The last principle contains two different heterotopias; heterotopia of illusion where you can enter without being restricted but your entry is illusionary. Some homelike hotel rooms and brothel house are example for this kind. On the other hand, heterotopia of compensation is epitomized through reservation areas assigned by American government for the Indians. As Foucault states “their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed” (ibid., 26).
Foucault strikingly illustrates heterotopia with a perfect example of ship. The ship which is defined as placeless place moves one place to another containing incompatible units in itself. As a heterotopic place, ship is described as:
A place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time it is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens […] The ship is the heterotopia par excellence (ibid., 27).
Each heterotopia involves all the principles to some extent, forming a diverse group of resemblances, but it is suggested that some are more ‘fully functioning’ or ‘highly heterotopic’ (ibid., 6). It is a dynamic representation which encapsulates “not only physical location but also abstract conceptual space” (Upstone, 2009: 3) offering multiplicity and fluidity; and time is not linear in such places but heterotemporal. Heterotopias are places where discussing coexisting times and spaces is quite possible. However, they do not aim at highlighting the links that hold them together or revealing the embedded layers. In effect, heterotopias offer “imagined, discursive, material, cultural, virtual and socially networked places and travels” (Knott, 2010: 79).
All these peculiar characteristics engender a complex relation with other sides of a society. This simultaneous, contested, and inverted network is potential for critical discourse not only in political theories but also in wide range of humanities from architecture to literature. Specifically, heterotopias become a potent theoretical tool in contemporary analysis of a wide array of spaces in literature. Which heterotopic principles could be included to the literary analysis? First of all, Foucault foregrounds the plausible relation between time and space when he claims that a society’s perception of time and the same society’s attitude towards space overlap. Likewise, such a temporal-spatial relation is also observable in literature. Secondly, heterotopias bridge the gap between a literary text and the real world. They allow an understanding that the literary text and the real world are not two separate units; instead, literature’s palimpsestic nature has the characteristics of archive for the real world. Because what is written about a particular space does not simply disappear when a new literary text is produced about the same place. In other words, the layered representation of space sheds light into society’s changing perception and chronological events of the time that each of literary work is written. As Andreas Huyssen asserts “real and imaginary spaces commingle in the mind to shape our notions of specific cities” (1997: 57). Taking the palimpsestic representation of space into consideration, the idea of heterotopia with its multi-layered and fluid structure provides a basis for theoretical analysis in literature.
Lastly, heterotopias allow to include spaces in literary analysis by giving specific focus on spatial representation rather than perceiving space as neutral or void of meaning. Space plays an important role in plot formation as much as the themes that the author tries to relate. In this sense, Russell West Pavlov underlines the fundamental change in the way how theorists perceive the concept of space. He argues that space had been considered as a passive parameter before structuralism and poststructuralism shifted the view. He accordingly, states that “space is an invisible ground which abruptly comes to light in modern literature because the avant-garde tradition insistently draws […] to the other aspect of language” (2009: 119). By turning space into an agency in narrative, meaning which is determined in relation to the context is strengthened. This contextual meaning determined by different variables is identified with heterotopic spaces which are in constant relation with other sites, whether real or fictious. This approach leads to the linguistic origin of the idea which the structuralist, Ferdinand De Saussure, in his theory of the signifier and the signified, touches upon. He claims that meaning is not acquired through the symbol it is identified with, but the relation between signifiers is the essential to access the meaning. Similarly, Foucault expands this idea to spatial dimension arguing that space only becomes meaningful through negotiation and confrontation with other spaces. In other words, a space comprises a network of meanings.
The idea of heterotopia can be adapted to literature in twofold way. Firstly, literary representation of a heterotopic space is foregrounded. For example, Foucault epitomises his idea through the traditional garden of the Persians in a way that vegetal and animal life from different parts of the world are brought in one location which evokes a sense of microcosm (1967: 19). There, all the incompatible units create a single site through which other sites are invoked. Such an image can be adapted to the city of London which functions as the Persian garden with its fame of being one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and culturally diverse cites. This could be one way of heterotopic representation of London, through which literary analysis could be possible. Secondly, there is a potential of heterotopia to represent itself in the form, structure, and narratological aspect of the text. In other words, characteristics of heterotopia are embedded in a literary text, which transforms the text into a heterotopic space. In this thesis, the former approach will be essential as it allows an understanding related to how the idea of heterotopia contribute to literary criticism.
