March 16, 2009

Still looking for ways to frame this project, I've hit upon the idea of situating it within the genre of urban mysteries. City mysteries are serial and novelistic genre that was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century and are typified by Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and G.W.M Reynold's Mysteries of London, though they spawned many imitators and offshoots, particularly in the U.S. Apparently the best U.S. iteration is George Lippard's Quaker City, (about Philadelphia) though there are of course many city mysteries of New York (most notably, New York by Gaslight and New York in Sunshine and Shadow). I briefly took a look at David Reynolds introduction to Quaker City and it notes that Lippard, apparently, was a sort of proto-Marxist, though he probably never read Marx, he shared many of his views about the power of labour etc. 

A better resource though, are books by David L. Pike, a contemporary scholar who has written three books on the imagination of underground and subterranean cities. I think this will be a better guide than Rosalind Williams more well known Notes From the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination . 

Chapter 3 of Pike's book Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 is great. It addresses the city mysteries genre extensively, and ends by talking about film noir and Blade Runner.  Pike also writes about cinema and has a somewhat interesting article in Wide Angle from 1998 about post-war literature and film about living underneath cities, though he doesn't cover extensively enough the visual representations of these undergrounds, focusing primarily on narrative elements without reference to visual construction. 

On p. 164-165 in Metropolis on the Styx though, Pike mentions the ways in which the city mysteries genre was constructed upon an idea about verisimilitude in its reference to real locations and social and economic realities -- in contradistinction to the genre that it ultimately was born out of, the gothic (of which Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho was the first to use the word "mystery" in the title) which was concerned with metaphysical incarnations of evil. I could eventually tie this in with a chapter I am considering that deals with location photography and the construction of verisimilitude (I think this is a somewhat fraught topic. Realistic settings and appeals to verisimilitude require just as much construction and labour -- as French Connection DP Owen Roizman notes -- as studio settings. There is a "reality effect" going on here. Will have to read Barthes on this.) 

Focusing on the idea of city-mysteries in my own project, instead of merely detection, frees me to engage a number of topics related though not directly under the rubric of detection/investigation. I even toyed with the idea of separating out my project into conceptual vertical and horizontal spaces: above ground, underground, up high, inside, outside, urban, suburban, exurban, etc. But I'm not sure this would really work that well.