UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Architecture of Homelessness: Space, Marginality, and Exile in Modern French and Japanese Literature and Film A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Jane Ramey Correia June 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Michelle Bloom, Chairperson Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender Dr. Sabine Doran Dr. James Fujii Copyright by Jane Ramey Correia 2011 The Dissertation of Jane Ramey Correia is approved: ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I would especially like to acknowledge my dissertation chair, Michelle Bloom. Without her guidance, encouragement, insightful criticism, and kind prodding, this project would not have been completed. She has championed my studies from the beginning. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Drs. Sabine Doran and Heidi Brevik-Zender of UC Riverside and Dr. James Fujii of UC Irvine, for their time and help editing my chapters as well as for their encouragement and support. I am grateful to Dr. Theda Shapiro, who has been a wonderful mentor and helped guide my studies since I first came to UC Riverside in September 2003; Drs. John Ganim and Michael Foster, who early on assisted me in formulating my project around the topics of liminality and spatial studies; Dr. Thomas Scanlon, chair of my Comparative Literature Department, who afforded me numerous teaching opportunities as well as fellowships to aid in my writing; and Dr. Yang Ye, who gave me the wonderful experience of being a teaching assistant in his comparative world literature class. I also extend my appreciation to Cambridge Scholars Press who is currently publishing an earlier version of Chapter 4 of this dissertation and to Timo Trevisani for helping me translate a German passage by Walter Benjamin. I am grateful to my husband, Ravi, my mother, Ellen, and my sister, Anne, for their unending love, encouragement, and support. —Jane Ramey Correia May 17, 2011 iv To my father, Lionel Correia, Jr., and my grandmother, Julia M. Ramey v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Architecture of Homelessness: Space, Marginality, and Exile in Modern French and Japanese Literature and Film by Jane Ramey Correia Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, June 2011 Dr. Michelle Bloom, Chairperson My dissertation, “The Architecture of Homelessness: Space, Marginality, and Exile in Modern French and Japanese Literature and Film,” explores the literature of marginality in the age of rampant urban growth and development, initially during the Haussmannization of Paris and during Meiji Japan. Both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, my project compares the liminal aspects of the architecture of two vastly different metropolises, Paris and Tokyo, through representations in literature and film. In addition, it reaches back in time to mid-nineteenth century and stretches forward to modern day. The opening chapters analyze works by writers Emile Zola, Higuchi Ichiyō, and Shimazaki Tōson, who captured their respective countries’ urban transformation as it was occurring and simultaneously represented the lives of people, especially the lower classes, marginalized by this exponential growth. In these chapters I argue that the liminal space left over from newly built architecture and the space on the edge of vi mainstream society becomes “home” to those displaced persons. This process of urbanization and the subsequent marginalization of its minorities irrevocably bind these two nations together. While my first three chapters concentrate on the rapid urbanization of Paris and Tokyo as represented in literature, in the final chapter, I articulate the way in which homelessness is depicted on film in France and Japan through cinematic analysis of five films: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon and Dodesukaden, Eric Rohmer’s Le Signe du Lion, Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, and Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive. I argue that these four filmmakers, in the style of Naficy’s “exile cinema,” confront this taboo topic in their texts by bringing the problem of urban failure to the public’s consciousness. Rather than mental illness, addiction, poverty, or ill-fated fortunes, I propose that the central problem of homelessness rests with an individual’s alienation from his or her community or in-group. Homelessness, urban living, and marginal spaces are not particular to any one city. My project moves away from East-West dualism and area studies to explore global concepts of space, the effects of rapid urbanization at its onset and today, and the problem of homelessness, which has no boundaries. vii Table of Contents Introduction Liminality 1 Aesthetic Traditions and Naturalism –– Van Gennep’s Liminality in Literature –– Turner’s Liminal Living –– Companionship and Communitas Chapter 1 Liminal Stairwells, Exposure, and Shame: Haussmannian Apartment Buildings and Zola’s Pot-Bouille 36 Introduction –– Second Empire Critic –– Controlling, Constructed Space –– The Rising Middle Class and Their Apartment Buildings –– The Apartment House and its Residents –– The Silent, Impenetrable Stairwell –– Explosions of Depravity –– The Right to Family and Home –– Disorder, Boundaries, and Conclusion Chapter 2 Liminal Living and Gervaise’s Tenement in Zola’s L’Assommoir 83 Introduction –– Displacement to Paris’s Periphery –– The Space of the Slums –– The Tenement of the Faubourg –– From Faubourg to City Center –– Misfortune, Consumption, and the Changing World –– The Liminal Cubby and Death –– Conclusion Chapter 3 Space and Marginality in the Meiji Literature of Tōson and Ichiyō 130 Introduction –– Space in Meiji Japan –– Haussmann’s Ideas in Tokyo’s Reorganization –– Ichiyō, Liminal Yoshiwara, and Socio- economics –– Takekurabe: Liminal Time and Space –– The Road of Possibility: Ichiyō’s “Jûsan’ya” –– The Dream of Homeland: Tōson’s Hakai –– On Homelessness Chapter 4 Broken Lives, Fractured Cinema: The Cinematic Representation of Homelessness in French and Japanese Film 175 Introduction –– Liminality Creates Possibility in Rashōmon’s Frame –– Dodesukaden and the Peripheral Slum –– No Hero, No Solution –– Vertigo in the Banlieue: La Haine and L’Esquive –– Loneliness, Isolation, and Le Signe du Lion –– Conclusion Conclusion Centering the Margins 226 Modernity and Naturalism in France and Japan –– Liminality versus Marginality –– The Unevenness of Modernity: Liminal Figures in Peripheral Locations –– On Roots and Homes viii Introduction Liminality In this dissertation I explore the literature of marginality1 in the age of rampant urban growth and development, initially during the Haussmannization of Paris and during Meiji Japan. Both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, my project compares the liminal aspects of the architecture of two vastly different metropolises, Paris and Tokyo, through representations in literature and film. In addition, the project reaches back in time to the mid-nineteenth century and stretches forward to the modern day. I argue that urban life alienates the poor and minorities, and the marginalized are often found exiled to “unbuilt,” liminal places, just outside the spaces that people call home. I use the texts of David Harvey and Maeda Ai (spatial studies), Sharon Zukin and Hamid Naficy (displacement and marginality), and Victor Turner and Paul Anderer (liminality) among others to provide the theoretical framework for this project. The contrast between built and unbuilt places looms large in literature particularly in the late nineteenth century. The space left over from newly built architecture and the space just outside becomes “home” to displaced persons, who were left homeless by a city’s newly constructed, uniform façade and highly controlled social environment. This similar process of urbanization and the subsequent marginalization of minorities in Japan 1 That is, the literature of those living on the margins of society. 1 and France irrevocably bind these two nations together. In addition, representations of the exiled people – images of people creeping in the streets, of people caught between city and country and between an agricultural past and an industrial future, of vagrants picking through trashcans, of the homeless going to desperate measures to survive as well as to assert themselves – are common to the cityscape of both countries. Zola’s novel Pot- Bouille (1882) describes the activities of their interiors and the highly rigidified society that entraps its inhabitants. Zola also examines those who live in the large, prison-like tenements cropping up on the periphery in mid-nineteenth century Paris in L’Assommoir (1877). Ichiyō’s Meiji period (1868-1912) stories “Jûsan’ya” (1895) (“The Thirteenth Night”) and Takekurabe (1896) (Child’s Play) champion the struggles of women and the poor in Meiji Japan by depicting their attempts to overcome strict social classes and societal norms. Tōson’s Hakai (1906) (The Broken Commandment) expresses the suffering of the burakumin, descendents of the lowest class who worked in animal slaughter and unskilled labor, who are excluded from the Japanese majority. While the first three chapters concentrate on the rapid urbanization of Paris and Tokyo and marginalization of their inhabitants as represented in literature, in the final chapter, I articulate