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Imagined utopias and lived dystopias: Literary imagination of the urban future in The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay


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Dhanesh Mankulam
CHRIST University, Bangalore, India
e-mail: dhanesh.m@christuniversity.in


AGATHOS, Volume 15, Issue 2 (29): 163-176, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13948983
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2024


Abstract: This paper studies the select literary narrative to underscore the idea that urbanisation is not a neutral process, rather, it has a constitutive political function as well. Analysing the fictional urban space based on Simon Parker’s four Cs—culture, consumption, conflict, and community— the article studies the theme of the interplay between the city and other factors such as memory, history, and identity. This paper sheds light on how cities are political spaces that constitute the mode and meaning of human life itself. Memory and forgetting became two important political factors here. While underlining that any political space is designed, controlled, and utilised to advance certain political objectives, this paper attempts to explore through the literature of the city, how the urban space can be conceptualised as such a political arena where urbanisation itself is a political process and goal. Urbanization is the evolution of an ecosystem of life where things and beings acquire totally different meanings and functions. The study asks questions such as: how is urbanization [re]constitutive of various values and meanings? How should urbanization be looked at first from within the narratives of the urban life (inside) and then from the narratives on urban life (from outside)? and how does certain narratives play a role in legitimising or contesting dominant spatial paradigms? The article will analyse the novel’s concern over the ‘the urban future’ if left to sway between memory/forgetfulness, tradition/modenity and human/machine. The paper also names the self-writing characteristic of the ‘anti-tradition’ urban space ‘ecriture-city. The paper also claims that the city, mediating through it population entropy and dynamic necessities, often rejects given traditions, and writes itself through its narratives of the present.


Keywords: urban utopias, urban dystopias, urbanization, literary urban narratives, ‘ecriture-city’


Introduction: Defining urbanization

Urbanization, a longstanding feature of human civilization, profoundly influences landscapes, societies, and cultures. Ilppo Soininvaara's characterization of the politics of urbanization, in The Politics of Urbanization: From a Global Imperative to National Struggles, encompassing economic, spatial, and socio-political struggles within a state, can lay the groundwork for understanding its multifaceted nature. Literary Urban Studies presents yet another set of aspects to look at the politics of the urban space. These narratives surrounding urbanity while playing a crucial role in shaping the process of urbanization also demonstrate the often-underestimated impact of urban life on various other factors of social life such as meaning, memory, hierarchies, belongingness, shared practices, sense of history or tradition etc. This paper explores the theme of the interplay between the idea of urbanity and different factors such as memory, history, and identity, with reference to the select novel. This paper sheds light on how cities are not simply neutral physical entities but also products of ideologies, power struggles, and socio-economic forces, shaping human life. The paper discusses how the select novel weaves a critical thread into the fabric of literary urban studies by presenting the dystopic landscape of a fictional urban context.

 Urbanization, a phenomenon for centuries, is linked to factors like migration, governance, social structures, and changing economic scenarios. The process involves the concentration of large populations in small areas, forming cities (Encyclo). The Industrial Revolution and the advent of Capitalism in the eighteenth century marked urbanization as a defining term for the socio-political context. “Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Nature, as an image and concept, nostalgia and hope, came into view, in opposition to the city” (Lefebvre 1968). In the 19th century, efforts to regulate urbanization arose. Engels' 1845 book Condition of the Working Class in England identifies living conditions and structures across English cities, highlighting how these structures create differential experiences based on social class. Robert Park observes, “If the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live” (Robert Park 1967).

 Urbanization, a phenomenon spanning centuries, results from factors like migration, governance, social structures, and economic shifts, concentrating people in cities (Encyclo). Its significance heightened during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of Capitalism, as reflected in the opposition between nature and the city (Lefebvre 1968). Attempts to regulate urbanization date back to the 19th century, evident in Engels' observations on class-based living conditions in emerging English cities (Engels 1845). Early works, like E. Howard’s To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform stressed the need for peaceful social reformation through urban planning (Howard). Park’s assertion that “if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live” underlines the inescapability of urban life in the trajectory of human progress (Park 1967). This is what is necessitating the contextualisation of the human individual within the dynamic coordinates of the urban space.

 Along with the developing discourse on urbanisation, other terms and concepts also found their movement to the centre of socio-political discourses, such as development, progress in both qualitative and quantitative terms, modernisation, automation of life, unconventional and anticonventional lifestyles, mobility and accessibility, relatively local diasporas, cultural and linguistic confrontations and sense of newness. A multitude of knowledge production has become necessary to understand these movements. “Geographical knowledges cannot be confined to any one discipline. They are produced in multiple locations, inside and outside the academy, and they shape multiple publics, for good and ill” (Gregory 2006). The urban is such a ‘multiplicity of public’.

 All these terms aforementioned have been looked at within positive semantics for a long time. Early writings on the urban life were cantering on the city as a site of human perfectibility (Rob Lathamand Jeff Hicks 2014). Now with the urban turn, marked with the noun ‘the urban’, we have started looking at the urban as a unique dimension of social life. Jane Jacobs, for example, in The Economy of Cities elaborates on how the intersection of diversity and density made the city a site for innovation and creative survival, hinting at the new emergences in the socio-political and cultural domains of city life (Jacobs 1969). The urban now denotes a condition of being where a number of factors and forces determine the physical as well as virtual aspects of the city’s lived experiences. As Henri Lefebvre states, “the right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit” (Lefebvre 1968, 173). David Harvey’s question is important here: “how is it that different human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualizations of space? (Harvy 1973).

 It is clear that urbanization then is also a subject position from which a specific and unique engagement with the world is made possible in a new and unconventional manner. The literary narratives in/of the urban space intersect here with the subject and the subject positions contributing to the experiences of the urban. Then the urban subject position – both as an individual and as a perspective of the space—becomes a formative narrative. The different coordinates of life as presented in these narratives, such as temporality, spatiality, visuality, and the everyday, then becomes the coordinates intersecting at the urban subject.


Review of literature

The concept of the urban

The emergence of urban studies intersects with many other vectors in critical cultural studies, such as literary studies, spatiality studies, memory studies, ethno-historiography and migration studies. Urban environments are studied at all these intersections as being constitutive of one’s lived reality. Urban environments are thus defined by being more diverse and more dense, with built environments and social structures that have larger dimensions in terms of size and scale than provincial or rural environments (Lieven Ameel 2). All studies of the city – including the study of the city in literature – are concerned with the “citiness” of its source material (Ameel 2023, 2). One noteworthy aspect of literary urban studies is its exploration of urban spaces as narratives in their own right. Walter Benjamin's notion of the flaneur may be one of the most widely used point of narration in both general urban studies and literary urban studies. Benjamin, drawing from Baudelaire, describes the flâneur as a walker in the city who is able to read the ‘text’ written on its surfaces and one who becomes their accomplice even as he dissociates himself from them (Benjamin 1982, 417). The figure of the flâneur works almost like an archetype in narrativising the urban space in literature. It also often works like the narrative point of view in depicting urban spaces as utopias or dystopias. In this depiction, we not only enter fully into the enduring significance of the city as a charged symbol of human consciousness but also experience the city anew as it speaks to us in the form of unfolding discourses marked by debate, disagreement, and intervention (Harding 2003, x). So the question is: “if the City is a text, how shall we read it?” (Oates 1981, 11-34) Literary urban studies, whether fictional or non-fictional, are precisely doing that: they read and depict the city space within a form of textuality. In this textualizing process, these narratives play a pivotal role not only in writing the city with its unique historicization but also in shaping public perception and discourse in and about cities. As Susan Sontag notes, urbanity itself can be regarded as a form of camp— a sensibility that revels in the artificial and exaggerated aspects of city life, “a vision of the world in terms of style, but a particular kind of style” (Sontag 1964, 3).


The space

The concept of spatiality, as it pertains to human existence and societal structures, has evolved significantly over time. Space is not a homogeneous expanse but a social product (Lefebvre 1991). Lefebvre postulates that urban spaces are not merely physical locations, but dynamic arenas of human interactions and experiences shaped by society. The spatial turn is important in propelling the examination of space into the forefront of intellectual inquiry, affecting disciplines from geography to philosophy (Soja 1989). Edward Soja also proposed reworking the Marxist theoretical paradigm from a spatial understanding of society. The urban is a social phenomenon par excellence (Lefebvre 1968). This phenomenon has no subject, or no primary definitive subject. Janusz Ziółkowski finds this as the motif within urban enquiries for the “intermittent efforts to find a subject with a distinct identity of its own” (Ziółkowski 1986, 6). Traditional historicism often overlooked this factor of spatial imagination (Soja 1989). Hence, spaces are produced (Lefebvre 1991). The ‘raw material’ from which they are produced is nature. They are products of an activity which involves the economic and technical realms, but which extends well beyond them for these are also political products, and strategic spaces (Ibid.). It is within this transformed intellectual landscape that urban narratives find their statements about how urban spaces are active agents in the production of social and cultural realities. In the space and fleeting moment of the urban encounter, passing glances and close proximity bring the narrators back to a shared past as an attempt to weave a fabric of familiarity over the projected strangeness of the urban context (Nesci 2014). Hence while the urban is a dynamic and central force in shaping contemporary life (Gandy 2013) the narratives pertaining to the urban is also constitutive of the urban space in its virtual and actual dimensions.


Utopia and dystopia

Within these narratives an urban space is often imagined as either a utopia which is a city that is both idealized and imagined (Crommelin), or a dystopia where the city is critiqued for what it is in its underlying experiential side. Urban mythology being one popular aspect of current studies, we must underline that the idea of utopia is quite different from that of myths or legends. Myth in is just a narrative or a story which are the instruments of expressions, and which is a stage on which anything can happen (Marnin 1984). Utopia on the other hand is a discourse, which essentially bears a certain fictionality within it. (Ibid.). These utopias of urban experience are hence more than just stories or narratives. These utopic imaginations often seep into the making of the urban also. Utopian thinking has always played a central role in the literature of urban design, with utopians being the first urban designers. (Ganjavie) These utopic imaginations often drive the urban developments and even determine the urban experience. People often make sense of their life in terms of the fictions of utopias they subscribe to. These are constitutive discourses that create and validate the urban everyday. Historically, utopia functions as a twofold discursive practice-poetic and projective. (Marnin 1984) The poetic is what adds meaning to the urban experience, and the projective is what leads the urban everyday through certain set transformations and trajectories. In this sense, these utopias even virtually bypass the urban predicaments and problems by adding poetic and projective veils over the everyday realities of the urban life. The discourse of utopia sets in full view an imaginary or fictional solution to the issues of urbanization (Marnin 1984, xiii).

 The dystopic realities of lived urban experiences pose a counterpart to these imaginations of urban utopias. Dystopian narratives present contrary poetics and projections of urbanity by emphasising and exposing the predicaments and problems of the urban context. This is where the critical dimension of urban narratives emerges to relevance. Here the urban life is portrayed with its real or anticipated problems in terms of accessibility, mobility, marginality, and similar positions. This is the unattractive face of the city which is often hidden, forgotten, or even abandoned in the onrush of urban changes. City narratives, both literary and discursive, often concerns with these two aspects: the charming and attractive utopias and the harsh and terrifying dystopias. Urban narratives not only reflect the underlying social structures but also shape them in unpredictable ways, “presenting a way of life that emphasizes hazard, strangeness and free choice: a mental paradigm that seduces as well as abandons” (Zukin 2006, 105). There are two potential narrative directions then: the threads of seduction and of abandonment. These are the two vectors of imaginations that literary urban narratives often consider. In the presentation of these threads the literary urban narratives often bring in the intersection of memory and forgetfulness, mobility and stagnation, marginal and mainstream, past and future, modern and conventional, and so on. Moreover, as bell hooks posits about marginality (hooks 1990), the urban also is a radically open space where conventions and novelty clash between each other and among themselves. Hence, literary urban narratives often open up sites clashes where these binaries come to evaluate the urban scenario.


Literary urban studies

Literary urban studies identify urban literature as literary spaces which are narrative- discursive spaces that play a constitutive role in the making the urban. Urban studies across various academic disciplines have been reinvigorated by this deeper engagement of the literary urban studies with urban life, its complexities, representations, violences, and oppressions. Literary urban studies fuse the creative and imaginative potential of literature to critically study the urban spaces and experiences. Appropriating Foucault’s statement that the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space (Foucault 1967) one can also see that this epoch is that of literary spaces as well in the urban studies context. Urban narratives will be the new literary emergence in that sense. Sharon Zukin aptly characterizes this interdisciplinary endeavour when she states, “literary urban studies merge the imaginative worlds created by authors with the physical and social landscapes of cities, inviting us to rethink our understanding of urban spaces” (Zukin 2006). Here it also intersects with cultural urban studies of various kinds.

 Literary and cultural approaches to the representations of urban change often focus on describing the simultaneity of social, political, infrastructural, economic and affective dimensions of cities and their transformation (Henryson 2023, 17). This transformative intellectual terrain has not only redefined how we perceive space but has also led to a revaluation of urban spaces both physical and discursive. Lefebvre recognizes that a kind of overall colonization of space by “decision making centres” seems to be taking shape, and these were centres of wealth and information, of knowledge and power, and various dependencies (Lefebvre 1968). Expanding from this point of view, literary urban studies, then, attempt to identify and trace the passions of the city, for “cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears" (Calvino 1974, 44). As Certeau (1984, 115) observes, “narrative structures have the status of special syntaxes. And every story is a travel story—a spatial practice”. Literary urban studies look at literary narratives not only as a simulation of the urban spatial practices but also as a spatial practice in itself. This perspective underscores the idea that the act of moving through the city is akin to reading or writing a narrative. But with each individual leaving their marks and traces on the urban landscape it also becomes a ‘writing’ of the city— ‘ecriture city’. This is similar to Roland Barthes’ proclamation in the Death of the Author: “the modern scripter is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicated; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now” (Barthes 1977, 145). Hence, the urban, which is always in its own making, is simultaneously woven through its literary urban narratives and imaginations also. It is against this self-making of the city—this paper calls this characteristic process ‘ecriture city’— that we shall read Simon Parker’s four Cs—culture, consumption, conflict, and community— of the urban experience. Motifs of utopia and dystopia also shall be traced through these Cs.


Analysis of the literary text

Culture and consumption

The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay is a novel written by Varun Thomas Mathew, and published in 2019. The whole narrative is presented through the narrator’s eye of one Mr. Convent Godse. The novel presents a dystopian image of a fictional condition of the city of Bombay, where the ocean has swallowed parts of the city and there is no more rain. The land is left totally barren and abandoned. The people of the city are now leading a technologically driven artificially-modulated life in what they call the Bombradrome—an artificial city contained within a big bubble-like towering structure. Quite fascinatingly, the people of Bombadrome have no memory of their own past. They don’t recognise that they have a past, or that the place where they live was once called Mumbai, nor do they have any memory of any of the cultural or socio-political context of the place. None of them remembers anything beyond their present life in the Bombadrome, except one person –Convent Godse. Godse is the only living memory of the people who live in an ‘absolute present’. As he states, “I remember a part of our history that no one else does. …I will perform the primary function for which I was chosen: to remind you of what … the city was once like, and how our people used to be, and what we have lost, and how low we have fallen (Mathew 2019, 147).

 The residents of the city have no access, even in their distant memories, to the actual history of the place. The residents are, first of all, made to breathe air treated with some dispersants that triggered an unusual forgetfulness in people while not affecting any of their other body functions: “one that left its victims’ normal faculties untouched but weakened their hold on the perception of history” (Mathew 2019, 418). Then, they are all fed with various glorified versions of history via what they call the History Casts media (Ibid, 496). The novel is critiquing the urban context of its over-emphasis on the present at the cost of all historicising narratives. Fredric Jameson stated that “the first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense— perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms… (Jameson, 1991, 9). What the novel tries to bring to the front of its critique is very much the same: a city characterised by a ‘depthlessness’ exhibiting a lack of historical or cultural depth and complexity. In that sense, we one can also look at the city as a postmodern spatial form.

 A profound sense of depthlessness unmistakably characterises the modern urban space. Its dynamic and ever-changing population is an important factor in this. There are 3 aspects to the city population: 1. They are either finding themselves ‘on the move’ at any given point of time in the city's temporality. In that case, they remain outside of the city’s discursive or narrative fabric. They identify themselves as the outsiders who are destined to leave at some point. 2. Some of them who settle in the city often find themselves not as insiders but as ‘outsider-insiders’—one who, like a diasporic split-subject, is inside and outside at the same time. Such groups also often fail to contribute to the city’s discursive/narrative fabric as they register themselves not in terms of continuity but in terms of discontinuity. 3. As a result of these and of other constitutive discourses surrounding ‘urbanity’, there is a perceived depoliticisation that is affecting the city context. As Erik Swyngedouw states,

While the city is alive and thriving (at least in some of its spaces), the polis, conceived in the idealised Greek sense as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical) dissent, and disagreement, and the place where political subjectivation literally takes place, seems moribund (Swyngedouw 2007, 1).

Fredric Jameson also expresses a similar idea in terms of ‘lack of agency’ and ‘pluralism as a value’ in his critique of postmodernism. The result of all these is a sense of ‘disconnectedness’ that characterises a majority of the city population, causing the aforementioned depthlessness. It is within this culture that the people engage in their cultural consumption. Bombadrome is an extreme of this kind of an urban space. The people of Bombadrome consume the narratives about their life, happiness, history and more within a culture of disconnectedness and forgetfulness.


Conflict and community

Explaining the four-Cs of Urban Studies, Simon Parker (2015, 4) states that conflict

…relates not just to visible, physical violence, such as riots or civil disorder, but to less visible struggles over resources…” [and Community] as a …‘value-term’ for contiguous association that bears with it a series of assumptions about how we, as humans, should live in close confine with one another.

As mentioned earlier, the novel is presenting a very dystopic image of an imaginary city, implying an extreme situation of urbanisation. Hence, the novel deals with the idea of conflict and community peculiarly: in Bombadrome, happiness is the theme, while conflict has no space in it. Life is programmed to be ‘always happy’, and the city’s community is defined in such terms. Referring to Henri Lefebvre, Parker writes that …a better alternative to the class-divided city is possible if only we can think beyond the realm of commodified space” (Parker 2015, 5). The novel, on the other hand, presents an imaginary city where class, caste and all such divisions are erased by a ‘techno-programmed life’. The city has a recycling mechanism that recycles every drop of water, including bodily fluids. The novel asks, “…how can the Brahmin claim that he is different from the Dalit when each consumes the recycled fluids of the other? Remember…it was through the recycling of our water that caste was finally annihilated” (Mathew 2019, 457). This is how the novel ensures “iron-clad unity” of the community of Bombadrome.

 In the imagined city, every aspect of one’s life, such as community, identity, memory, history, happiness, etc. are unified with one techno-programmed mode of life. The classical question of ‘who governs’ is answered with a new dimension of technology here. In the contemporary context of rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Big Data, brain augmentation and neuroscience technologies, the distant dystopian image that the novel presents seems closer than ever. Bombadrome is the totality of all comforts and contentment the people of the city would want in their technology-controlled lives. Conflict is deliberately avoided not at the personal or ethical level but at the technological level using a software-assisted Virtual Reality system called the Bhaashafish. The Bhaashafish system is connected to a virtual network called AREBO (Alteration of Reality within the Bombadome project). The people communicate using this system exclusively, and with the system in place,

if people swear, their words are censored. Rudeness is redefined, nastiness is nullified, and any conversation that could be even slightly upsetting to the listener is rewritten by the Bhaashafish software into the most cheerful, civilized and convivial exchange ever. And so the residents of the Bombadrome get along, even in the most trying of circumstances, for each is won over by the (digitally altered) charm of conversation of the other, and peace is easily maintained (Mathew 2019, 397).

Hence everyone is totally understandable and pleasing to each other and “the very concept of ‘alien’ became alien to all” (Mathew 2019, 397). The motto of this totally artificial city is to keep everyone happy. Godse’s narrative gives an outsider perspective of the Bombadrome life. He exposes the city as an example of an urban dystopia. Edward Soja’s work on “Thirdspace” posits that space is not just physical but also a conceptual realm where alternative realities and social imaginaries can emerge. It is “a particular way of thinking about and interpreting specially produced space” (Soja 2002). The novel in that sense is giving a ‘third perspective’, quite different from the conventional ways of looking at the question of urbanity in terms of an ‘urban - non-urban’ binary.


Conclusion

Varun Thomas Mathew’s bold fiction debut ‘The Black Dwarves of The Good Little Bay’ interrogates politics and memory in a dystopic and uninhabitable Mumbai (Bharucha 2019). Bombadrome is an example of an extremity of urbanisation that is insensitive, mechanical, and overly technology-driven. These are similar to the concerns that AI and robotics raise in the contemporary time. The author makes a strong political statement and a serious critique of a kind of ‘urbanization logic’ throughout the book by highlighting an extreme form of urbanisation that not only strips human beings of their memory, meaning, and culture but also institutionalises extreme modes of uniformity, rootlessness and artificial contexts of existence. Citiness, as it appears in city literature, pertains to the city’s particular presence (Ameel 2023, 2). It is “a presence and not simply a setting” (Pike 1981, 8). Bombadrome represents a kind of ‘citiness’ that the author must be foreseeing from the present. Extending from this reading of the novel, one can also see that the urban spaces can be read as a practical and existential manifestation of postmodernity at large. The logic of postmodernity largely constitutes the logic of the modern city as well.


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