David L. Pike
The slum can remind us of the way periphery and center are mutually constituting forces, and its absence from modernism per se can remind us of the literal absence of that relationship from modernism. The further we move from the traditional centers of modernism, however, the more we find other ways of thinking about the slum.
The word slum entered the English language through London cant, or underworld jargon, in the early nineteenth century. We might imagine the subsequent vagaries of the term moving something along the lines of the Victorian life of the “Improbable Impostor” Tom Castro, as recounted by Jorge Luis Borges in his early book A Universal History of Infamy (1935). Born Arthur Orton to a Wapping butcher in the “the drabness and squalor of London slums [barrios bajos]” (31), Castro runs off to sea as a youth, jumps ship at Valparaiso, Chile, and knocks around South America before finding himself in Australia, where on a “run-down corner” in Sydney he makes the acquaintance of the “genius” Ebenezer Bogle, a black servant, by helping the latter overcome his fear of traffic and cross a busy city street. Bogle persuades his obese friend Castro to return to London to impersonate the fit and trim military officer Roger Charles Tichborne, believed lost at sea. Tichborne’s grieving aristocratic mother is deceived by the improbable impostor, but after her death the heirs bring suit against him. Aided by Bogle’s genius—he convinces the jury that “Tichborne” has been the victim of a Jesuit plot—Castro wins the case, only to lose the impetus for the deceit when Bogle is struck dead by a carriage in Primrose Hill. Borges resurrects not only the slums and penny-dreadful tales of the previous century, but he intimates quite strongly that they continue to circulate the trade routes of the world no matter what the writers at the heart of the empire may have decided. What began on the mean streets of a Victorian slum, he suggests in the diction of the Buenos Aires underworld, returns to upscale Primrose Hill as a preposterous feat of imposture that is both historical and literary. Needless to say, this is a very different literary genealogy than we have been accustomed to expect from modernism, which tends to define itself as the negation of the slum and its associated meanings.
The nineteenth-century English industrial city had no exclusive rights to urban poverty, either spatially or temporally, but it is possible to see in it the beginnings of a new mode of describing that poverty and of a new need to fix its time and place, for which the term slum was eminently suited. Among the European languages, slum is a much newer coining than the French taudis or the Spanish and Italian tugurio, the English shanty, the Portuguese cortiço, or even the American tenement, but that’s partly because this older set of words is primarily descriptive and limited in scope to a single dwelling—a shack or a hovel, but also a shelter—or to a single building.1 The unknown derivation of slum helps account for a symbolic power quite different from the descriptive combinative forms that the French, Spanish, Italians, Portuguese, and Germans, among others, use to describe poor and informal urban settlements more broadly: quartier pauvre or bas quartier, barrio bajo or barrio suburbi [a], quartieri bassi, bairro da lata [tin], Elendsviertel or Elendsquartier (Elend meaning misery or wretchedness). The lack of any iconic quality has made the word easily adapted to a variety of languages: slum is current usage in, among others, Finnish, German, Slovakian, Swedish, and Tagalog. Moreover, since the United Nations reintroduced in the 1990s a term that had been effectively banned from the social sciences and the “habitat vocabulary,” the word slum has returned to prominence worldwide in academic and policy discussions of urban poverty over a variety of apparently more neutral terms.2 So, while a myriad of local and indigenous terms and practices exist, the slum looms over representations of urban poverty just as modernity and European modernism loom over local, marginal, and less codified or differently developing forms of modernity and modernism.
Modernist Slums
The slum is a modernist invention in several ways. First of all, in the philological sense it is a new coining, for it has no known etymology (Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London”) and is distinct in meaning from prior, related words such as ghetto (a bordered, and traditionally walled, urban enclave for an ostracized community) or court of miracles, holy land, rookery, and other terms for particular urban spaces appertaining to or sheltering criminal, divergent, or otherwise marginalized communities. It is also a spatial invention, a fundamentally new concept of modern urban planning that facilitates the division of once integrated cities into discrete zones either worthy or unworthy of preservation, secure or dangerous, licit or illicit, above- or under ground. And it is a literary invention that appears as a topos, especially in the novel, from the early nineteenth century, becomes a dominant motif in realism and naturalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, and is repressed almost wholesale in modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century, to say nothing of modernist art and architecture. Because of this vexed relationship, the modernist slum can help us grasp what it would mean to expand the scope of modernism temporally, spatially, and generically, just as it can also help clarify the tensions and contradictions involved in that same expansion.3 For, strictly speaking, global modernism can have no slums in it, or it ceases to be modernism.
So, the slum is a slippery concept. While a vehicle and consequence of modernity, it is also a repudiation of it, a sign of its failure or of resistance to its ostensible progress. If modernity is about how “all that is solid melts into air” and modernism is about giving apt expression to that feeling and process, the new, nineteenth-century usage of the word “slum” is all about solidity, about something so unmelting in air that it defies description and requires the physical act of demolition in order not to represent it but to make it disappear. You cannot enjoy a slum; you can only look away from it in horror while calling for its demolition. To be sure, you can get a lot of play from the act of looking with your eyes shielded or from staring with them so wide open that they risk being blinded by what they see. The first type of looking is usually called realism; the second, naturalism. Established as literary genres in the nineteenth century, these representational strategies persisted throughout the twentieth century in what we might term nonliterary discourses such as popular journalism, the social sciences, urban planning, and politics, where the slum is consistently if not obsessively present as a sign of an obstruction to the process of modernization or as evidence of its dangerous state of incompletion. Whether the discourse of outrage is mobilized to justify social inequality, real-estate speculation, and political oppression or in order to claim basic human rights for the poor and the dispossessed, it deploys the full range of the slum’s negative power as an image of disease, filth, suffering, and hopelessness.
Modernism, in its canonical formulation, repudiated both of these strategies as the province of a played-out and misguided Victorianism. As Virginia Woolf put it in her polemical dismissal of the novels of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy as “unworthy” of the right to be called “books at all” (and by “books” I presume she means here something like what we have tended to call “modernist” books): “In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque” (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 12). Realism, which sought to integrate the slum into the greater fabric of the cityscape, enforced a Whig narrative of history and a moral calculus widely considered to have been bankrupted by the end of the First World War, if not before: those worthy of being saved would be saved, those proved unworthy would be damned, and the slum would be either cleared or left behind. Naturalism, which limited its purview of the urban to the slum at its most prurient and most extreme, was concerned either to expose its threat to the broader social fabric it impinged upon but was distinct from or to describe in the full horror of its details the plight of those trapped within. But in so doing, it eliminated any trace of human agency or autonomy. For a modernist, the slum posed two problems. First, it restricted the call for social change to the elimination of what was not modern, even as the definition of “modern” was seen as, at best, complacent and conformist or, at worst, oppressive and imperialist. Second, as the epitome of what was not modern, it eliminated any positive alternative to status-quo modernity through the prejudgment of its own overwhelmingly visceral negativity.
An inverse relationship between the kind of materiality embodied in the slum and the kind of reality sought by modernists militates against their easy coexistence. Reading against the grain can restore slum materiality to modernist texts, but I want to argue that a more productive project is to explore the relationship between the two. The question to ask is not so much where the slum is in modernism as what its absence means and how we can make that meaning critically productive. A trace of the slum is there, certainly, when Gregor Samsa dies an unwanted vermin in The Metamorphosis (1915), the shell-shocked Septimus Smith tosses himself on the spikes of the iron fence enclosing the entrance to his lower-middle-class building in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), or Matthew O’Connor trawls through a fever-dream Paris in Nightwood (1936). The slum becomes, in this sense, what modernism can never name or represent directly, the truths it must only gesture at, because to describe them directly has been rendered impossible by the phenomenon of modernity. Here, it is the source of modernism’s Sprachkrise, and all of the complex stylistic gyrations are always only there to create a no-space from which that truth, “the horror,” can emerge without being named directly because to name it would vitiate the power, the very identity of the truth.
Modernism, as Adorno eloquently established, was, quite simply, the end of the road. Perhaps we could take the garbage cans inhabited by Nagg and Nell in Beckett’s Endgame (1957) as a final, vitiated trace of the slum in the abstract space of the negation of everything, the last vestige of the possibility of representation, signifying by its presence the impossibility of representing anything else, its banality and ugliness reminders that we couldn’t possibly still want anything to do with it anyway. But then, why couldn’t we? As in Endgame, the ultimate truth of the slum remains a phenomenal one: the fact that people do live in it, no matter how unspeakable and unrepresentable it may be as an abstract quantity or aesthetic quality, and the fact that people do prefer living in it to not living at all. And this truth is what makes the slum such a powerfully enduring topos for the modernist imagination. Can we thus see in the project of the new modernisms an endeavor to rediscover some concept of life, of pleasure or happiness or utopia, in the experience of modernity, a grudging concession that these qualities will have to be discovered in modernity since the illusion no longer remains that we have anywhere else outside of modernity to look for them? High modernism was nothing if not ascetic and forbidding, and even when it might proffer the faintest hint of enjoyment, that hint must be bracketed and quarantined as far as possible. And always in terms of the slum: modernist sex and violence are given to us as sordid and perverse, and the most urban of the modernist writers tend to be the most sordid and perverse, the most slumming and gritty of all—Céline and Döblin, Miller and Barnes. No wonder modernists tend to give Joyce a free pass here; however difficult Ulysses or Finnegans Wake may be to read as novels, they at least make no apologies for the relief of laughter and small pleasures. Whatever else they may be doing, they are not slumming. Like urban representations before the invention of the slum, Joyce’s Dublin exudes identical qualities, if in different keys, no matter where in the city one may be. If the modernist style is an attempt to reintegrate the city (or the world) through linguistic invention, the slum is the inevitable trace of its failure to do so. As long, that is, as we continue to judge modernism according to its own all-or-nothing formulations.
Slum, Before and After Modernism
There is a complex temporality to the slum as urban space and as concept. Historically, slums are a product of the processes that create big cities and segregate and condense the populations within them; slums are a direct consequence of modernization and industrialization. But slums are also temporally unstable since a slum is not generally purpose-built but the result of the informal conversion of existing urban dwellings or the occupation of an empty or underutilized urban space. Most commonly, slums arise in previously middle-class areas that have descended more or less rapidly into poverty. Moreover, since a slum, once labeled as such, will eventually be razed, redeveloped, or (more recently) gentrified, the material spaces tend to be transitory, although their legends frequently outlive their materiality. Most big cities will always have something we can call slums, but those slums will not always be the same ones. And because slum is a symbolic and relational term rather than a legal or purely descriptive designation, whether a neighborhood becomes or ceases to be a slum over time and whether a city becomes or ceases to be identified more or less broadly with its slums may have little or nothing to do with the material circumstances of that neighborhood or city. Also, because the slum is by definition a reused or appropriated space rather than a newly created one, it accumulates multiple and often contradictory meanings rather than the unified or coherent one that, say, a purpose-built row of terraced houses, a new suburb, or a unified apartment block might have. The latter forms may, as they are lived in, acquire contingent meanings in conflict with or contradiction to their original conception. But the term slum is a designation we give to an urban space whose dominant conceptual meaning has wholly ceased to dominate. Finally, the experience, or the representation of the experience, of living in a slum or visiting a slum can change radically depending on who is having the experience or performing the representation. One of the effects of a global modernism and a global modernity was a growing consensus discourse about the slum; one mark of being modern was the ability to recognize and employ that discourse, just as one mark of a cosmopolitan author was the ability to recognize and employ the discourses of modernism. At the same time, because it was a global discourse, it could be mobilized for a number of different purposes besides simply echoing the categorical definition of “slum.”
A typical strategy of the new modernist studies has been to extend the temporal boundaries of the movement’s core decades both forward and backward. A related strategy would consider also the effect of historical distance on how we read modernism. For example, one may conjecture as to how strongly the postwar descent of the neighborhood of Harlem into both material and representational slumdom may have influenced the oft-noted exclusion of the Harlem Renaissance from the modernist canon during that same period. How could postwar critics reconcile the vibrant urban portraits and the freighted ambiguity of pleasure and oppression, high art and low jazz, uptown and downtown, with the brutally infernal visions of Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx that dominated the cultural register from the 1960s until quite recently (and as they dominated the annals of sociology and urban planning from even earlier on)? How could the mixed registers of the Harlem Renaissance make any critical sense in a postwar America where popular culture was freighted with the utopian pleasures of suburbia and the dark urban horrors of film noir and where urban studies was ruled by Lewis Mumford’s repudiation of the hellish megalopolis and the Chicago School’s structural model of neo-Victorian moralism? Similarly, how could anything resembling a working-class or slum modernism be countenanced in a postwar Britain whose urban centers of working-class sociality had been bombed into oblivion and whose newly built council housing projects appeared either life-sapping prisons or concrete jungles breeding criminal delinquency? How could any middle ground be possible in a Cold War climate in which the CIA funded modernist art criticism and worked to undercut the legitimacy of figurative art and where any trace of conventional mimesis risked the taint of socialist realism and communism? The slum was either a death trap for the poor, a breeding ground for crime and radicalism, or simply nonexistent. If modernism had successfully repudiated the slum as the emblem of the literature it wanted to replace, the postwar reception of that modernism successfully eliminated any trace of the slum that a different approach might actually have been able to find within the culture of the years from 1890 to 1945.
One of the fallacies of conventional accounts of modernism by Woolf and others is to establish a certain year—usually sometime in the second decade of the twentieth century—as the absolute line of demarcation between one generation of writers—the Edwardians, or nonmodernists—and another—the Georgians, or modernists. As if, in Woolf’s case, Wells (d. 1946), Bennett (d. 1931), and Galsworthy (d. 1921) had all ceased producing in 1910, as if no “modernist” had done anything before that year, and as if no one else somehow might have had a different relationship to that chronology. Certainly, it remains a persuasive periodization, and it perfectly accounts for what Woolf wanted it to account for: the sort of literature she was writing and wanted to be written and the ways in which she wanted it to be read. There are no slums in it, and she discounts even the thought of slumming out of it (when young Elizabeth Dalloway escapes eastward on the #11 bus, she barely makes it as far as the western edge of the City, much less all the way to the East End). But what happens when we periodize differently? What would a Victorianist modernism look like, and what would modernism look like if the postwar reception of modernism hadn’t happened to it? What does it mean in this context when the Victorianist historian Seth Koven blithely ignores conventional periodization and begins his recent study Slumming with the simple statement that “For the better part of the century preceding World War II, Britons went slumming to see for themselves how the poor lived” (1)? That different periodization suggests a Victorianist approach to thinking about the question of modernism, but it also raises fascinating questions about the explicit repudiation of the material detail Woolf objected to so much in Bennett, for Koven justifies his timespan according to a shift in methodology in which the slum is not ghettoized but integrated into a broader critical framework. “To understand how elite men and women thought about the poor,” he argues, “required me to reckon with how they thought about sex, gender, and themselves” (4).
Nor did all experimental or innovative writers between the wars feel the need to define what they were doing according to a break with the past. Among the “exercises in narrative prose” (15) collected in Borges’s Universal History of Infamy and recounted in what he calls the “entonación orillera” (“popular accent,” literally “accent of the outskirts”) of working-class Buenos Aires are half a dozen from the nineteenth century, ranging from London’s Arthur Orton to the gangs of New York and from outlaws on the Mississippi to Billy the Kid in the American West to Ching Shih, the so-called Widow Pirate of the China Sea, and spanning five continents, the seven seas, and more than a millennium of history. Typically, Borges claims from the start to be merely the “translator and reader” of an eclectic collection of sources, of which he cites the Victorian Robert Louis Stevenson, the early twentieth-century (but not modernist) G. K. Chesterton, the expressionist director Josef von Sternberg’s “early films” (presumably the atmospheric lower-depths dramas Underworld [1927] and The Docks of New York [1928]), and “a particular biography of the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego [1883–1912]” (15). A Universal History of Infamy constitutes something like a slum tour of the modernizing world, but one that finds in those slums not the negation of modernity but an alternate, nonmaterial, history of it that recounts both its infamous treatment of those it consigns there and the unique qualities of “infamy” exhibited by its in habitants and visible nowhere else.
Periodizing modernism within some strand of Victorianism provides one strategy for reading it differently; it’s a strategy that has been deployed in a highly productive manner, for example, in the recent literary, visual, and cultural production of steampunk, which attempts to imagine the twentieth century as if modernism had not occurred or had occurred very differently. What happens to modernism when we imagine it from the point of view of the nineteenth century—not the straw man that sat back and was shocked by its provocations but the one dreamed of by writers around the globe for whom alternative nineteenth-century modernities might still have been taking shape around them long into the twentieth century? And, by the same token, what happens to modernism when we filter out the distortions of the 1950s and 1960s? In many ways, the new modernist studies can be characterized as an often tacit answer to both of these questions: a post–Cold War taking-stock and a pre-1910 recuperation. It is telling that a leading light in both of these new narratives is the slum. As the Scottish novelist Jane Findlater (1866–1946) wrote around the turn of the century of a “slum movement in fiction” that she considered finally to have reached as close to “truth in their picture of slum-life” as such an approach could do, “it may be seriously questioned whether all attempts in this sort are in vain” (Stones from a Glass House, 187). If the slum in fin-de-siècle fiction marked the apogee of a certain kind of realism and the slum in postwar fiction worked to impede the recognition of any social content in modernism or the recognition of literature with any social content as modernist, how can we use the slum topos as a tool for rethinking the temporalities of modernism?
Slum, Above and Beyond Modernism
Rethinking the temporalities of modernism does not eliminate the years 1890–1945 any more than rethinking its geography eliminates London and the other imperial capitals as its centers of gravity. Borges’s “rereading” (Universal History of Infamy, 15) of the past ranges through world literature from a base in Stevenson and Chesterton, just as the trajectory of the infamous impostor Arthur Orton takes him from London around the world as Tom Castro and back again as a resurrected Roger Charles Tichborne. Among the key functions played by the slum in the economy of modernity is as a migratory hub, the teeming point of ingress and egress of a city that would prefer its identity fixed in space and looking resolutely forward. That the underworld cant from which the term slum emerged has been variously attributed to Irish, Roma, and unknown impostors can help remind us that slums appear in cities primarily as a consequence of migration, be it internal or external. They are the parts of the city where its past and its future intersect or, rather, where that intersection is conventionally located and understood to be occurring. Such a process could be more strictly defined in the medieval ghetto, for example, where clear rules determined movement and restricted the rights of the ghetto population, even though in the everyday life of the city movement between the ghetto population and the rest of the city was in many circumstances more fluid and less clearly defined than in theory. But ghettoes, like city walls, are created in order to endure; slums are created in order to be eliminated. What happens to the population of a slum when the slum is demolished? Symbolically, it is eliminated; practically, it simply sticks around, hovering nearby and making a new slum, or it travels the global network of slum spaces, each one, as Borges slyly suggests, both identical in its qualities to its fellows and unique. Ghettoes testify to ossified power relations (or at least to the desire to have those relations ossified); slums testify to the instability of those same relations. “Mobility, not fixity” is central to the definition of the slum, asserts Koven (Slumming, 9), even as, I would argue, the function of the designation is to attempt to fix a single identity onto an essentially mobile phenomenon.
The slum is a prime location for the colony in the heart of the empire or for those elements of the colony that are the hardest to fix or control (as opposed, for example, to its commodities in the shop windows). Not only were slum and colonial outposts “linked in the British imperial imagination as places of freedom and danger, missionary altruism and sexual opportunity” (Koven, Slumming, 21), but the global mobility instantiated by empire was a major factor in the creation of slums, just as imperial forces tended to create slums within colonial cities by surrounding, containing, and newly framing old parts of those cities by new neighborhoods designed on the modernist model. So, the slum can remind us of the way periphery and center are mutually constituting forces, and its absence from modernism per se can remind us of the literal absence of that relationship from modernism. The further we move from the traditional centers of modernism, however, the more we find other ways of thinking about the slum, of negotiating between the modern colonial city and the mixed slums, just as they negotiate between the discourses of modernism and the other mixed discourses also available. And the more we seek alternate geographies of the traditional centers of modernism, the more we also find other ways of thinking about the slum, as when Monica Ali reverses Elizabeth Dalloway’s bus ride in Brick Lane (2003) to bring her Bangladeshi family from Whitechapel to St. James’s Park, a sightseeing tour by a family in local residence for thirty years and a daughter who insists that London is “where she’s from.” Nothing about the bus has changed in the eighty years between novels: same route, same double-decker design, same conductor taking their tickets. And nothing about the parks and palaces of the West End London Nazneen and her family see has changed either. The geography and the social divisions are identical, just as, Ali implies, the descendants of the Dalloways are; what has changed are the slum dwellers. But how do you narrate that turning of the tables, and is turning them as simple a process as riding the bus in the opposite direction? Ali needs the slum to underpin the liberatory anger and oppressive violence of Nazneen’s tale, but she also needs Woolf’s modernism in order to narrate an outside to that slum and to grant subjectivity and agency to Nazneen, her daughters, and her friends.
The novel concludes with another bus ride, this one exclusively female and only for fun. Blindfolded, Nazneen knows the bus is taking her somewhere, but we are kept in suspense about where there is, except that it is somewhere on the route. It turns out to be an ice-skating rink, an artificial modern recreation of the frost fairs held on the frozen Thames at irregular intervals between the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “But you can’t skate in a sari,” she protests. “This is England,” her friend tells her. “You can do anything you like.” Ali introduces the operative cliché of skating on thin ice in order to resist it, only to substitute the more recent cliché of multiculturalism. What could be more persuasive evidence of having left both modernity and modernism behind than this last blithe assertion, the words with which the novel concludes? It’s not hard to see it as a capitulation by Ali to the easy solutions of realist fiction, the happy ending, the ground firmly beneath the heroine’s feet, with her rented ice skates the grudging but gracefully finessed concession to the tenuousness of the twenty-first century. But that would concede that modernism somehow still holds the key to the representation of reality, and Ali has just spent an entire novel enumerating the limits of modernism. Like Borges back in the 1930s, the vernacular reminds us that the black hole of the modernist slum sucks into itself what is most seductive about the slum for those with a foot still outside modernity. For the threat of being melted away is equally the promise of remaking yourself anew, and endlessly. And that threat is also the promise of vernacular literature, the one that never ends.
Slum—to Use the Vernacular
Rejecting the slum novel for making of the slum a strange sensation rather than seeking to grasp its essence, Chesterton argued that “the kind of man who could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man who could share them” (“Slum Novelists and the Slums,” 281). Writing in 1905, Chesterton took his examples from theatrical melodrama, but it was the cinema that was best equipped to capture “the pleasures of the poor” and suggest the positive potentialities of the slum. And it is the popular cinema and other examples of what Hansen has termed “vernacular modernism” that constitute the largest body of slum depictions within the conventional timeframe of modernism, that have dominated the representation of slums since the end of that timeframe, and that are the most popular, if not the only, slum representations actually consumed by slum dwellers. Hansen stresses “the new physicality . . . the material presence of the quotidian” and the “new sensorium” that Hollywood and other world cinemas “produced and globalized” along with images and sounds. “Even the most ordinary commercial films,” she argues, “were involved in producing a new sensory culture.” The context of the slum, however, complicates the spatiotemporal coordinates of this argument, for what the cinematic slum offered was not so much a new sensory culture as an old sensory culture. Or, better, it offered a way of representing neither the old sensorium of realism nor the new, anodyne sensorium of modernity but a novel combination of the two. Where modernism was able to represent this combination only in the contradictory negation of an absent presence—the unspoken slum that localized a vanished truth that could not otherwise be enunciated—the spectacular visuality of vernacular modernism conjured an unforeseen meeting of conventional narrative, a rapidly codifying visual grammar, and what Trotter calls “low mimetic detail,” or “existence as such” (The Uses of Phobia, 133, 126). The cinema’s ability to register visual detail in the margins of the frame permitted the slum to appear in its everyday qualities as well as in the mythic qualities of its narrative function.
Even more than in the experimental modernist cinema of surrealism, impressionism, or Soviet montage, mainstream narrative cinema could narrate the slum while also simply documenting it. This is not to argue that there is a documentary quality to the cinematic slum—whether constructed in the studio or filtered through a camera, the actual urban spaces never appear as such—but to suggest that the qualities of the slum otherwise unavailable to modernist representation—the actual experience of living in them and the potential for agency and subjectivity within their spaces—did find their way into narrative cinema of the period in ways they were not able to do in other forms.
There is no single cinematic slum, and they range in their depiction from the symbolic hells of German expressionist city cinema to the outlaw paradises of the Hollywood musical to a hard-hitting naturalism that makes the lower-depths novels of Zola and Gissing feel restrained. In all of them we find the familiar tropes of the slum from popular literature: the power of invention admired by Borges in his infamous impostors, the transgressive sexuality and disregard for convention of Louise Brooks’s Lulu or Musidora’s Irma Vep, the powerful criminality of Mack the Knife and myriad other underworld gangsters and criminal masterminds, and the working-class sociality and community almost wholly absent from modernist literature. Of course, we also find all of the clichés and framing devices that work to keep us from taking these tropes too seriously: the concluding punishment of Lulu at the hands of Jack the Ripper or the restoration of order following any threat by the slum to flow out of its boundaries. The spatial qualities associated with the slum are especially amenable to suspense and to comedy, as in Chaplin’s Easy Street and The Immigrant (both 1917), for the lack of order, the protean character, and the unpredictability associated with them in the nineteenth century are precisely those ingredients that also contribute best to the thrills and spills of slapstick.
The slum musical would take these contradictory qualities to their extreme. The musical slum was sufficiently stylized to vitiate any real sense of suffering or menace in the setting. The sheer artificiality of the scene—the saturated colors or glossy black and white, the conventionality of the action and types, the simultaneous repression of sexuality and foregrounding of desire and emotion in song—stresses the performativity of slum roles. The “Limehouse Blues” number in the 1946 revue film Ziegfeld Follies, performed by Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer as a down-and-out Chinaman and a kept Chinawoman in a gaslit and foggy Victorianist set derived primarily from the world of D. W. Griffith’s silent melodrama Broken Blossoms (1919), well exemplifies the multiple layers of artifice and mediation involved in vernacular modernism’s evocation of desire. First, the song itself is performed in a basement bar by jazz singer Harriet Lee, whom we glimpse from outside through ground-level windows as her voice plays over the soundtrack. Foregrounded is an entire melodrama in miniature, with Astaire smitten by Bremer’s yellow-sheathed comfort girl. Caught in a shootout subsequent to a robbery, he dies holding an oriental fan he has snatched from the broken window for the girl. The dance sequence occurs within his dying imagination, a red-tinged fantasia of Chinoiserie. Returned to “reality,” we find the fan broken as the girl brings her patron, modeled on Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto, into the shop to buy the fan. When she finds it, broken, in Astaire’s hands, she drops it to the ground. It’s a performance, in other words, of the already derivative melodrama of Griffith’s film twenty-five years earlier, abstracting the Victorianist elements of slum Orientalism, female virtue and vice, and unrequited desire into the dance within the dream. But even within the most lurid tragedy, the sequence argues, inhere beauty and fulfilled desire. That it’s also a preposterous fantasy is part of the point.
Musical performance in the slums, however outlandish in premise, always reminds us that creativity, hope, and pleasure exist in the slums along with poverty, suffering, crime, and degradation. Indeed, it argues that the latter are fundamentally productive of the former, however unlikely the connection might appear in “realist” terms. That’s a dangerous argument, especially made in aesthetic isolation, and this is one reason the modernists repudiated it so virulently, especially during the 1950s. Yet it was an essential ingredient in the popular film genres of modernizing postwar nations such as Mexico, where the cabaretera genre found a way to permit women to sing in public, through the fallen-woman scenario that brought them to the slum as cabaret performers; Brazil, where the enduring chanchada genre set romance among comic antics and samba singing in the favela; and postindependence India, where the early peak of the Bollywood musical combined slum narratives with intricate and exuberant playback musical sequences, as in the blockbuster hits Awaara (1951) and Pyaasa (1957). Especially when approached as a global phenomenon, the slum musical offers a vernacular modernism—formally experimental, self-reflexive, allusive, and genre blending—that was also highly popular. Without question, these films are negotiating the tensions between modernization and tradition; the very technology of the cinema provided a vehicle of modernity able to stand in for so many others.
That cinema-going was one of the most pleasurable and popular forms of everyday modernity should not be underestimated. In their complex investment in and distance from the economic forces of the big city, and in their reliance on but distance from the popular quarters of those cities, the movies could express the gamut of experiences and emotions encompassed by the slum rather than solely their powers of negation and destruction. The tradeoff, certainly, was in the overtly fantastic quality with which those experiences and emotions were represented, the kind of vernacular improvisation we hear in the first recorded usage of the word in Pierce Egan’s Boxiana (1812), “The flowing harangue of a dusty cove . . . lavish with his slum on the beauties possessed by some distinguished pugilist.” These slum fantasies are a far cry from contemporary exposés such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (2007), for which the slum operates as the topos for the very different desire for basic human rights. Can we conceive of a slum capacious enough to contain the fanciful panegyric of a ramshackle sportsman, the justified outrage of the contemporary activist, and the indelible traces of “experience as such” while flexible enough to account for all of their contradictions? I suggest that we can find it, as the Victorians used to say, just around the corner from the bright city lights or, as Borges suggested from Buenos Aires, in that modernism where the mean streets of East London can be found nestled amid the fashionable West End homes of Primrose Hill.
Notes
1. Taudis derives through medieval French from the old Scandinavian word for a tent and originally referred to the cover placed over a shored boat; tugurio derives from the Latin word for roof; shanty from the French chantier (“a place where one sleeps and stores one’s work things”); cortiço from the word for beehive; tenement from the Latin for “freehold,” its primary English meaning—the American usage to describe an overcrowded apartment building built for poor people dates from the second half of the nineteenth century (OED).
2. For a nuanced account of the UN revival of the word “slum,” see Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum.”
3. I am adapting these categories from Mao and Walkowitz’s characterization of the “temporal, spatial, and vertical directions” in which the new modernist studies has expanded in recent years (“The New Modernist Studies”).
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