When I first moved to the Marais, I bought a book of old photos of the neighborhood, and walked around - the architecture is of course the same - with antennae out for the ghosts of the streets around my apartment. (Ghosts ignore me habitually.) My street is named after an early battle of the war for Italian unification in which the French assisted. But all around there are far older names: Rue Vielle du Temple, Rue du Temple, the haunts of the premier occult spirits, those archetypal phantoms of eerie ancient-post-modern historicism, Molay and posse. The oldest building in Paris is around the corner.
The Marais was, before the Second World War, a working class neighborhood and the Jewish Quarter. The Jews were rounded up by the Vichy police and taken to the velodrome, then deported to death camps eastward on trains. After the war, a few survivors returned, and the neighborhood somehow, with a new influx of Maghrebien Jews, retained its ethnic character, though now it is overwhelmingly the place for falafels not brisket or gefilte fish. For a time the area remained working class. In the 1970s, it was seedy and cheap; even the magnificent Place des Vosges was home to squatters and pirate radio stations. The construction of the Opera Bastille in this odd, dingy neighbourhood began the change; Mitterand’s France set this elite destination in the heart of a grungy arrondissement ostensibly as one tactic in the project to open opera and ballet to a broader audience Now it’s the most expensive real estate in Paris. By the early 80s, the neighbourhood had been ‘settled’ by chic gay bars and chic, high income gay men; inevitably, fashion and media professionals of all romantic orientations followed.
On the Rue des Francs Bourgeois - a charmingly crooked narrow street running east through the Marais from the Place des Vosges, lined with 17th and 18th century structures, grand Hotels Particuliers, and bearing that history encrusted name - you will find the shops whose shopping bags read:
New York-London-Paris-Beverly Hills-Tokyo.
- as if the shops were magic portals connecting these places, your credit card your magic carpet, lamp or key, the shopping bags the only map you need.
- Is this London?
- Madam, this is Cartier. It’s always the right address.
Peter Ackroyd writes of haunted sites, and England - Albion - itself is his archetypal haunted place. And the English the most haunted of people, always suspecting (rightly) they are not themselves, they are golems, they are possessed by romantic poets, they are the bearers of some ancient cursed or sacred blood. London and Londoners above all: his London: A Biography recounts the history of the city as the history of the citizenry. The buildings and streets which preoccupy urban historians are merely the husks of this great organism that is London. Bloomsbury was always home, Ackroyd notes, to folks with a penchant for esotericism and sorcery. Clerkenwell has for centuries been about proletarian organizing and uprising. It is as if the themes of various great works of English literature were fogging the atmosphere and clotting up thickest always close to home, a specific lintel, gate or pavement slab, seeping from the old stones (even when those old stones have been replaced by glass and steel.) Something haunts these patches of ground, these streets, something at which names like Petticoat Lane only faintly hint, and it possesses the people who inhabit its proprietary vales.
Humanity-centric and materialist, in a certain sense, as Ackroyd’s project is, Terry Eagleton, who is not a stranger to the recording of historical haunting, registers this objection:
The book [Albion] is, to be sure, a symbolic rather than social history of England; but it is remarkable how that symbolism reflects one social version of the nation rather than another. Ackroyd’s England is a Chestertonian realm of monks, mystics, and morris dancers, not of slave traders, colonial adventurers and industrial manufacturers. Despite his praise for the tolerant, adaptive, all-inclusive nature of English culture, there is no suggestion that it ever did anything for which it might be criticized. …There are of course vital cultural affinities at work in any culture, which the postmodern cult of the discontinuous damagingly ignores. Even so, it is hard to discern quite as intimate a bond between Durham Cathedral and the Lloyd’s building as Ackroyd does. From this view-point, there would seme to be little to choose between Jonathan Swift and Graham Swift….Ackroyd’s imagination, like Seamus Heany, has always been possessed by the notion of the past a depth to be excavated within the present, as vertical or geological rather than horizontal and historical. The present is a kind of palimpsest through which the spectral lineaments of the long-buried are dimly visible, awaiting their disinterment by the redemptive rights of the literary imagination.
I had these words in mind today, by chance, when I ran into the postman in the lobby of my building. He handed me a package which had obviously been torn open, by accident or design, between the sender and myself. It had been partially taped closed with this yellow tape I have seen before on packages which have been opened by customs officials. But this came from within the EU.
Inside was a book, and inside that a story by China Miéville, Reports of Certain Events in London, which begins,
On the twenty-seventh of November 2000, a pakage was delivered to my house. This happens all the time - since becoming a professional writer the amount of mail I get has increased enormously. The flap of the envelope had been torn open a strip, allowing someone to look inside. This also isn’t unusual: because I think, of my political life (I am a varyingly active member of a left wing group, and once stood in an election for the Socialist Alliance), I regularly find, to my continuing outrage, that my mail has been peered into.
I mention this to explain why it was that I opened something not addressed to me. I, China Miéville, live on _________ly Road. This package was addressed to a Charles Melville, of the same house number, ______ford Road. No postcode was given, and it had found its way, slowly, to me. Seeing a large packet torn half-open by some cavalier spy, I simply assumed it was mine and opened it.
A tale beginning with such allusions promises a journey. With - however difficult to decode it may be - a map. A treasure map, that is none other than the world, the map traced by wrongdoing or accident or passion on the pavement and the walls, the map fugitive deviance or heartbreak inevitably leaves for the curious. It will lead inescapably to a place. The right place. The letter which has gone astray must find its destiny. Because it is places that are haunted. Whoever heard of haunting without haunts? That place holds the mystery’s solution, as Ackroyd‘s London holds the ectoplasm of Cavaliers, Diggers, and Scrutiny, and Albion houses the poltergeists of Pendragons and Plantagenets.
Bear that in mind while I make a little digression picking up on the subject of my opening remarks: the vast expropriation of the commons quaintly called ‘gentrification,’ the New York-London-Paris-Beverly Hills-Tokyo real estate boom. What does the presence of Starbucks - NY-London-Amsterdam-Manchester-Charlottesville-Fez-Pristina-etcetcetc - on London's grey and pleasant streets mean for the project of erecting the New Jerusalem on the tumulus of Albion? Is it the sign of an advent?
Parallel to what appears to be a marvellous globalization of Prada, of Madison Avenue-Bond Street-Rodeo Drive-Rue Des-Francs Bourgeois, of Starbucks, but unseen by their clientele (who know the coffee comes from somewhere), the favelas, the banlieus, the shantytowns spread.
And what happens to the red light districts, the barrios, the slums, as ‘gentrification’ rolls over them, as they are gobbled up by New York-London-Madrid-Riyad?
Yes, there is something terribly suspicious about Ackroyd’s haunted courts, lanes and closes; it is in a sense the romantic companion of the discourse of ‘rough neighbourhoods,’ ’slums’ and ‘banlieu’ where the atmosphere itself is threat, a living spirit, a monstrous organism, and the inhabitants flora and fauna native to the clime, the exotic, carnivorous fish of these waters, eliminatged when the Force of Gentle Gentility drains and annexes the terrain for the global Shopping Bag, and, simultaneously, polishes up the local curiosities, renovates, restores, and acquires the old stones complete with tamed ghosts for a superior charming shopping experience.
What sort of diversion is Ackroyd (and not he alone) trying to cause with this sanctification of locality, the newly upscale neighbourhood as tomb of undead burlesque prostitutes and ferrymen, as sacred burial ground of jesters and mountebanks, haunted castle, the circle of standing stones, the perfect little café where Sartre smoked and argued or Jaurés met his death?
New York-London-Paris-Madrid: So mobile you can carry them on a shopping bag, walk into London in Berlin or Prague and come out in Beijing. Gentrification: looked at candidly, it is a tale of terror fit for Blackwood’s magazine. And every neo-gothic thriller which guides us on the portentous and fateful journey to the place, the seat of mystery, the ancient ruin, the cellar with the false door, the scene of the crime within the vicinity of which the answer to enigmas natively and permanently dwells, may serve the televisually evangelized house porn of L.L. Bowen.
But woe alone can await the aspiring homeowner who is looking to purchase a cheap loft in an up and coming neighbourhood in Reports of Certain Events In London. Something is going on which would make any ambitious buyer eager to get on the property escalator think again. Place, it seems, that founding comfort, that steady ground under the feet, Limehouse and its Golem, Chiswick and its Hogarth, is no more stable for phantoms than for refugees. They’re not the homebodies, not the devoted ghoul nationalists, we've imagined all this time. Indeed, so strong is the spirit of mobility, it is not the geists but the haunts themselves which have upped stakes and are emigrating hither and thither; the quaint, ancient, fabulously local streets have become poltergeists on the lam, manifesting in twisted, unfamiliar shapes and vanishing again, this city, now that, as fleet, agile, and unpredictable as the capital which possesses them and then hops across the globe to some other Hampton, Main or Wall Street in Melbourne or Montreal.
The envelope delivered, open, to ’the wrong address’ contains fragments of the records and correspondence of an organization dedicated to sighting apparitions of Rue Sauvages, streets which have vanished from the previously fixed position to surge up like Nessie, here and there, in other cities, other countries, with neither explanation nor pattern.
Evidently we must forget any hope of returning to the sacred place, the enchanted grove, the locked library room, for the resolution and redemption. The blitzkrieg of New York-Paris-London-Tokyo - a story told alas only incompletely, in fragments, the financial figures effaced - has driven the lares from the hearths; they are now leading a spectral and unstable existence as Feral Lanes, itinerant, homeless avenues and alleyways. No longer a commons as once commons were, but at once alienated, unseen, and globalized.
