ENCHANTED CATASTROPHE

What an amazing country where the houses are taller than churches —FERNAND LÉGER AFTER VISITING THE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 19311

“What is this new religion?” he wondered, and then concluded: “It’s Wall Street that dominates this new world with all of its height.”1 Léger’s astonishment may seem dated today, when luxury high-rises and tall office buildings have come to appear more banal than transcendent, and stands in contrast to the more sensationalistic response of his friend , who quipped that New York’s skyscrapers were “too small” when he visited the city four years later. Yet his ultimate point remains remarkably acute: “the vertical push is in line with the economic order.”2 For in contrast to the traditional image of the religious spire, the capitalist transformation of the tall tower typology has come to represent the Americanization of metropolitan , and although ostensibly secular, it continues to be mystified to this day. The skyscraper is more than just a symbolic icon of capitalist power, however, for as Carol Willis argues in her study Form Follows Finance, it is also direct index of financial investment and real estate speculation.3 Léger apparently recognized this not long after the stock market crash of 1929 when he wrote: “Wall Street has gone too far in transforming everything into speculation. Wall Street is an amazing abstraction, but catastrophic. American vertical has gone too far….”4

1. Fernand Léger, “New York,” in Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004), 152-3. Translations by author. First published in Cahiers d’Art VI, numbers 9-10 (Paris, 1931), and in English in Functions of Panting, translated by Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 2. Ibid., 153. 3. Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). In addition, as investor Andrew Lawrence has argued, booms in skyscraper construction may be interpreted indexes of economic crises and boom and bust cycles, from the Panic of 1907 and the Stock Market crash of 1929 to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the World Financial Crisis of 2008. Lawrence presented his thesis for Dresdner Kleinwort Benson research in 1999 under the title “The Skyscraper Index: Faulty Towers.” For further discussion, see Andrew Lawrence, “Talking Tall: The Skyscraper Index,” Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Journal, Issue II (2012), 42-44. See also “Towers of Babel” in The Economist (March 28, 2015). 4. Fernand Léger, “Le Mur, l’architecte, le peintre,” in Fonctions de la peinture, 177. Translation mine. First published as “Discours aux architectes” in Quadrante (Milan) II no. 5 (September 1933), 44-77.

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CREATIVE DESTRUCTION, MODERNIST ENCHANTMENT, AND THE VERTICAL TURN Such fascination with the catastrophic potential of speculative verticality may be compared in illuminating ways to the more scholarly concept of “creative destruction,” which refers to the process by which capitalism depends on crisis and ruin in order to innovate and expand.5 As the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter explained it in his classic study Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which was published in 1942 a decade after he settled in the United States, creative destruction is the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”6 While Schumpeter referred most famously to the metaphor of a violent storm to represent his theory, leading to the often-cited trope “Schumpeter’s gale,” he also conceptualized it in distinctly architectural terms: “In breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse.”7 As we shall see, similar comparisons between capitalist development and gothic or religious architecture became especially commonplace in transatlantic discourse about the rise of modernist Manhattan, and even attempts to critique the hubris of the city from the outside ended up dwelling on its apparently enchanting verticality. Both the spectacular image of the skyscraper as well as the forces of creative destruction that helped enable its development came to be endowed with an aura of the technological sublime,8 and this mythologized power became especially fascinating and disturbing for French visitors to New York, who viewed the city’s ascendance as a growing challenge to the cosmopolitan hegemony of Paris from the roaring twenties to the dawn of the so-called “American century.” For, if Paris had been seen as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, then New York evidently came to supplant it as the cultural, economic, and mythologized capital of the twentieth century.

5. Marx and Engels introduced the argument that the contradictory, self-destructive power of bourgeois society leads to the periodic “annihilation” (Vernichtung) of capital through “explosions, cataclysms, crises,” and Werner Sombart was the first to formalize the term “creative destruction” schöpferische( Zerstörung) in his 1913 essay “War and Capitalism.” However, it was ultimately Schumpeter who expanded on this concept most in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. For a more general consideration of this idea in relation to the development of New York City, see Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 6. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1994). 82-3. 7. Ibid., 139. Many critics have since developed upon this theory in various ways. Especially notable in studies of modern urbanization is Marshall Berman’s classic book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, which includes a chapter on the “Innovative Self-Destruction,” although it is perhaps the Marxist critic David Harvey who has engaged with Schumpeter’s concept most directly and extensively over the years. As he explains it, “creative destruction is embedded in the circulation of capital itself. Innovation exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force of pushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 106. 8. Leo Marx introduced the concept of the American technological sublime in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 194-7. David Nye developed it further in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). On the idea of the “sacred skyscraper,” see Thomas A.P. Van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

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Long before Michel de Certeau wrote his often-cited essay “Walking in the City,” which begins with a view from the top of the newly- constructed World Trade Center in order to critique its panoptic power over pedestrian life, French reflections on New York oscillated between wondrous awe and fearful suspicion. While Léger’s essays on the city are relatively under-recognized, more well-known interwar examples include whole books by Paul Morand and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who became famous for their outright , and Le Corbusier, who read their writings and was evidently influenced by them.9 Among the many French intellectuals and artists who found exile in New York during the war was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who ended up writing about his memories of the city several decades later. And soon after the war came to an end, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir embarked on solo adventures to the United States and joined the growing discourse of twentieth- century américanisme through remarkable travel essays of their own. Despite their many differences, each of these French writings on New York express a similar sense of awe with regard to the city’s kyscrapers, especially in contrast to the dominant Christian verticality of Europe, and a critical distance concerning the destructive potential of American ascension more generally. For above all, New York came to be seen as not only a “vertical” or “standing city” [ville debout], as Céline first called it in his novel Journey to the End of the Night, but also an “enchanted catastrophe” [catastrophe féerique], as Le Corbusier put it soon afterward:

New York is a vertical city, under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful and worthy catastrophe. Nothing is lost. Faced with difficulties, New York falters. Still streaming with sweat from its exertions, wiping off its forehead, it sees what it has done and suddenly realizes: “Well, we didn’t get it done properly. Let’s start over again!”10

Because this fascination with American verticality was concerned with the creative destruction of capitalist urbanization in particular, it was markedly different from the “Babel complex” that Roland Barthes saw in the French mythologization of the Eiffel Tower.11 In turn, it was not simply resisted, but also in some ways embraced. As Le Corbusier

9. As Mardges Bacon notes, Le Corbusier studied and annotated his copy of Morand’s book especially closely, and may have even taken it with him on his trip. Other French writings about New York that he considered include Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930) and André Maurois’ En Amérique (1933), as well as an early 1926 essay by Christian Zervos, the editor of Cahiers d’art (in which Léger later published his essay on the city). Zervos’s account was published in the first issue of the journal and was illustrated with a flashy, kinetic photograph of Times Square allegedly taken by for ’s photo-essay Amerika. Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 137-40; 207. 10. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White (London: Routledge, 1947), 36. 11. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and other Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of Press, 1997), 7.

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explained, “For me, the enchanted catastrophe is the lever of hope.”12 Le Corbusier’s conception of New York, like his “tragic view of architecture,” as Charles Jencks has called it, obviously draws from Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Dionysian spirit in The Birth of Tragedy (and the word “catastrophe” itself derives from the ancient Greek kata-strophe, a spatial metaphor meaning “down-turning”). The celebration of intoxicating excess was also noted by Léger, who wrote in a letter to Le Corbusier from New York: “I'm still constantly astonished by the vertical urge of these people drunk with architecture.”13 At the same time, the dependence on Christian references and the apocalyptic fantasies that they shared with many of their contemporaries seems to confirm at least to some extent the much-debated arguments of Jacob Taubes and Karl Löwith that modern, secular ideas of historical development derive largely from older ones of religion, and especially eschatology. For as Löwith argued in the conclusion to his study Meaning and History, which he developed while living in exile in the United States during the war: “The modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason.”14 According to Löwith, both perspectives involve “appropriating the world through constructive destructions” and adopting “a practical attitude in the face of catastrophes,” which “continues in spite of, or rather because of, radical changes and transformations.”15 Although this theory has been critiqued in various ways since it was put forth in the aftermath of the World War II, it should help us understand why so many visions of modern urbanization, technology, and economic development continue to dwell on traditional, mythical and religious ways of thinking despite appearing otherwise secular. As Thomas Piketty has argued, both “apocalyptic” and “fairy tale” approaches to economic history and forecasting continue to hold sway despite being more “magical” than scientific.16 It thus seems inaccurate to explain the long twentieth century of American ascendance according to a simple secularization thesis, or even a more pluralistic theory of the “secular age,” which Charles Taylor has defined as “the sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid replacement of the vertical model with the

12. Le Corbusier, 9. The translation is amended from “The Fairy Catastrophe,” as the word “féerie” refers not simply to fairies but to a more general form of enchantment, especially with regard to the genre of French theater that popularized fantasy plots and spectacular special effects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the hopeful power of tragedy has been recognized at least since Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, Le Corbusier’s catastrophism could be said to straddle the line between myth and fairy tale. According to Bettelheim’s distinction, “myth is pessimistic, while the fairy story is optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some features of the story may be.” Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977), 37. 12. Quoted in Fernand Léger, edited by Carolyn Lancher (New York: The Museum of , 1998), 36. 14. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 207. See also Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). 15. Löwith, 207. 16. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 11-15.

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horizontal one.”17 Curiously, Taylor’s argument suggests that only religious ideas of transcendence adopt spatial metaphors of verticality and that secularism depends on more horizontal metaphors of immanence. The rise of the American skyscraper evidently complicates this argument, however, as does Adam’s Smith’s Enlightenment-era image of the “invisible hand” of capitalism. For even as the modern high-rise appears to represent a simultaneously vertical and secular form of urbanization perhaps not seen since the aristocratic tower boom of medieval Italian cities, its iconic image has become enchanted with an ideological fantasy of capitalist transcendence that borders on faith. And so, we might say that the twentieth-century vertical turn involved a process by which the “spirit of capitalism,” as Max Weber called it, worked to recast traditional and mythical models of transcendence instead of simply replacing them.

INTERWAR ASCENSION: BETWEEN THE MYSTICAL AND THE ECONOMIC Fascination with this “spirit of capitalism” is clearly evident in interwar French writings about New York, especially after the Wall Street crash of 1929, in which both fantasies of apocalyptic catastrophe as well as more critical reflections on socio-economic inequality seemed inseparable from wonder at the spectacular manifestations of American industry, innovation, and speculation in the built environment. Thus instead of confirming Weber’s argument about the modern “disenchantment of the world,” or Manfredo Tafuri’s image of the American skyscraper as a “disenchanted mountain,”18 many travelers to New York apparently discovered new forms of ideological and aesthetic re-enchantment (albeit with varying degrees of critical suspicion). As French visitors might have noted in particular, the new American verticality seemed to disprove the prediction “this will kill that” [ceci tuera cela] from Victor Hugo’s great nineteenth-century novel Notre Dame de Paris. For although Hugo’s fictional Archdeacon Claude Frollo was in many ways right that the mystical power of Christian architecture would be undermined by the rise of secular literary culture (or what Benedict Anderson called “print capitalism”),19 little could he predict that modern “cathedrals of commerce” would appear on the American skyline bearing repeated comparison to the religious verticality of the gothic. Although these tall towers were prone to frequent demolition, they evidently produced a mythical, transcendent sense of permanence and durability

17. Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 392. 18. Manfredo Tafuri, “The Disenchanted Mountain: The Skyscraper and the City,” in Giorgio Ciucci et al., The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal, translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), 389-503. An implicit reference point for this image is ’s novel [Der Zauberberg], which may be read as a modernist retort to Weber’s theory of disenchantment [Entzauberung]. 19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

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that was especially fascinating to European visitors from abroad. In this way, while so many visions of metropolitan America seemed to confirm Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” many also appealed to what he defended as the “eternal and immovable” half of art.20 When Paul Morand visited New York between 1925 and 1929, what impressed him perhaps more than anything else was what he called its “mystic and economic” ascension. While taxis appeared to him like “horizontal tubes,” he was rather more fascinated by elevators as “vertical ones,” and even saw the crowded streets as “rungs” on a ladder for social climbing rather than a gridiron plan of horizontal circulation (a concept that Albert Pope has since theorized in much greater depth).21 At the same time, Morand remained nostalgic for the time when the spire of Trinity Church still reigned over the city: “today,” he wrote, “it is vanishing, strangled by banks, merely the smallest and darkest of the downtown monuments. Religion has no business here.”22 Unlike Henry James’ defense of Trinity Church in his 1904 book The American Scene, however, Morand ultimately ends up forsaking the church in favor of the city’s new verticality in the end. Calling the skyscraper “the modern artist’s symbol of America,” he concludes:

If a style is the expression of life at a given moment, America now has every right to say that she has a style…[the skyscrapers] are the shrines of Success— financial success, as pleasing to the Puritan God as prayer. Like cathedral spires, they strain heavenward with an urgency at once mystic and economic.23

By claiming that America achieved its “style” through the erection of giant office buildings, Morand arguably helped pave the way for the concept of the International Style to emerge only a few years later. Despite the apparent of these “shrines of success,” however, he continued to compare them to traditional, sacred architecture, thereby suggesting that, instead of becoming monuments to secular capitalism, they managed to combine the mystic and economic into a single devotional function. Such comparisons between America’s new capitalist vernacular and the history of European religious architecture provided direct models for Le Corbusier’s book When the Cathedrals Were White, published

20. , The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Press, 1995), 13. 21. Paul Morand, New-York (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1930), 312. See also Albert Pope, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014). Morand became so intrigued by the rapid urbanization he witnessed during his trip that he wrote another book that same year called On Speed, which would become a major source for Paul Virilio’s theory of “dromology.” 22. Morand, 50. 23. Ibid., 45-6.

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soon after his first trip to New York in1935 . Not only did Le Corbusier in many ways follow in the footsteps of French writers like Morand and Céline (appealing to their literary style as well as their growing interest in right-wing politics),24 but he was also a close friend of Léger’s—and in fact both came to New York to prepare exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in the same year.25 Le Corbusier was invited to the moma by (who was himself a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite during this time),26 and his work had already been shown in the museum’s landmark show “: An International Exhibition,” which Johnson curated with Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock three years earlier. While the trope of the “vertical” or “standing city” is often attributed to Le Corbusier, it was in fact Céline who first introduced it in his 1934 novel Journey to the End of the Night. Describing his arrival in New York by boat, Céline’s autobiographical narrator Bardamu tells us: “Just imagine, that city was standing absolutely erect. New York was a standing city [New York, c’est une ville debout].”27 He goes on to call the view of the skyscrapers from the street a “reverse vertigo,” thus suggesting that the view from below can induce just as much dizziness as the proliferating views from above.28 His other response to the bewildering verticality of the city is laughter: “We laughed like fools. You can’t help laughing at a city built straight up and down like that.”29 Morand also imagined the need to laugh at the vertical construction of New York, although from his perspective, it was a kind of internal defense mechanism against the city’s incessant cycle of creative destruction: “The town spends its all, lives on credit…is ruined, starts again and laughs.”30 Perhaps because the Wall Street crash had not yet taken place when he made his visit, Morand ultimately saw the city as more constructive than destructive, however, and revealing his emerging sympathies with fascism, he compared it favorably to Mussolini’s Italy after the Great War:

24. On Le Corbusier’s move to the far right in the context of 1930s French politics, see for instance Mary McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier From Regional Syndicalism to Vichy (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1985); Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Simon Brott, “Architecture et Révolution: Le Corbusier and the Fascist Revolution” in Thresholds 41 (Spring 2013), 146-157. Several recent French-language books have also focused on this topic, including François Chaslin’s Un Corbusier, Xavier de Jarcy’s Le Corbusier: Un Fascisme français, and Marc Perelman’s Le Corbusier: Une froide vision du monde. For a short, comprehensive overview, see Joseph Nechvatel, “Revisiting Le Corbusier as a Fascist,” in Hyperallergic, July 10, 2015, http://hyperallergic.com/221158/revisiting-le-corbusier-as-a-fascist. 25. On Léger’s and Le Corbusier’s trips to New York in relation to their comparable machine aesthetics, see Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Norton, 1990), 169-176. 26. In a memorial essay on Johnson for Architectural Record, Robert A.M. Stern notes, “Many have brought up Johnson’s Nazi and American right-wing sympathies of the 1930s as if this were secret information. Embarrassing, yes, but not secret…It was not only Johnson’s pro-, but also his presumed anti-Semitism that we [students and faculty at Yale] considered.” Michael Sorkin’s response in the same publication is somewhat more critical: “Johnson's fascination with fascism deeply informed his work….His own philosophy was rooted in a school-boy Nietzcheanism of supermen and the will to power.” Architectural Record, May 2005, 375-6. 27. Louis Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, translated by Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 1934), 159. 28. Céline, 165. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Morand, 138.

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I like New York because it is the greatest city of the universe, and because it is inhabited by the strongest type of people—the only one that has succeeded in organizing itself since the War; the only one that does not live on the credit of its past reputation; the only one, along with Italy, that does not demolish, but knows, on the contrary, how to construct.31

By contrast, when Léger reflected on the creative destruction of New York in the early years of the Great Depression, he ended up dwelling on the traumas of the Great War, and with provocative irony, imagined the city’s potential demolition in comparison his experience of combat:

Destroy New York, they will rebuild it all anyway. Including the works of architecture, such admirable targets. Demolish New York! It’s impossible that Marshal Pétain wasn’t tempted for at least a second, a half-second. […] Soon after a new city is built, then what? I give you a thousand! In glass, in glass!32

Léger did in fact serve in the Battle of Verdun under Marshall Pétain, who later became the Chief of State in the collaborationist Vichy regime. Yet unlike Morand, Céline and Le Corbusier, he did not end up appealing to fascist politics or “ modernism” himself, and ultimately settled in the United States instead of Europe.33 That said, they all embraced American culture more than the likes of Martin Heidegger, who reviled what he called the “destructive evil” of “symbolic America” in various contemporary writings, and who actually defined the entire country as “the site of catastrophe” in a lecture he presented in in 1942.34 In Céline’s novel, this fantasy of degenerate America was represented primarily by the character referred to as the “catastrophic Negro,”35 who worked as a servant for Lola, the white American woman who first inspired the narrator’s adventure to New York after he met her in Paris. While Bardamu regards Lola as an enchanting transatlantic bridge, it is this unnamed black man who becomes the embodiment of catastrophe in his racial fantasy of American history.

THE CITY AND THE WORLD: BETWEEN THE POST-MYTHICAL AND THE PRE-HISTORIC Of course the great irony is that it was Europe that fell most deeply into ruin during World War II rather than the United States. Yet instead of romanticizing the triumphalist myth of the “American Century,”

31. Ibid., 301. 32. Léger, “New York,” 158-9. 33. Jeffrey Herf, : Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34. Quoted in Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 298. 35. Céline, 188.

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French writers like Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, and Beauvoir found themselves contending with the actual trauma of destruction when reflecting on their time spent in the country. While their writings on New York reveal an obvious enchantment with the city, the European catastrophe and the rise of American hegemony forced them to reject many of the mythical archetypes of their predecessors, and they ended up turning to a somewhat more worldly sense of both immediate history and the longue durée. Lévi-Strauss was especially remarkable for avoiding the Christian clichés of his contemporaries, both due to his training in cultural anthropology and because he did not come from a Christian background himself; and in writing about New York he turned to naturalistic rather than religious analogies in order to come to terms with what he witnessed first-hand. In some ways, this more scientific approach might appear compatible with Hans Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith in his study The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which argues that modernity involves a complete recasting, reshuffling, or “reoccupation” Umbesetzung( ) of religious ways of thinking rather than a mere secular implementation or “transposition” (Umsetzung) of them.36 However, Lévi-Strauss’s vision of New York pays little attention to individualistic ideas of self-assertion, which Blumenberg claims to be distinctly modern, and focuses instead on large-scale geological metaphors to depict the city as a strangely pre-historic yet immanent ruin. In this way, his approach bears potential comparison to the Catastrophism of the post-revolutionary French scientist Georges Cuvier, sometimes referred to as the “father of paleontology,” who opposed the gradualist theories of his contemporaries by arguing that major geological transformations and biological extinctions occur above all through catastrophic natural events rather than slow, continuous erosion and evolution.37 For according to Lévi- Strauss’ vision of modern Manhattan, the “fantastic cliffs” of the island’s skyscrapers loomed over the “chasms” of its avenues like “some spontaneous upheaval of the urban crust,” while in turn:

…peaks emerged from the surrounding magma like witnesses to different eras which followed one another at an accelerated rhythm with, at intervals, the still visible remnants of all those upheavals: vacant lots, incongruous cottages, hovels, red-brick buildings – the latter already empty shells slated for demolition.38

36. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). 37. There is some speculation that Cuvier developed this theory in response to his experience of living through the French Revolution as a child and his general conception of the event as simultaneously catastrophic and progressive. See for example Martin Rudwick’s conclusion to Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts, edited by Martin Rudwick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 38. Lévi-Strauss, 258.

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Despite the tectonic instability of this apparently self-destructive environment, Lévi-Strauss managed to make himself at home in New York while living there in exile during World War II. Reflecting on his time in the big city several decades later, as well as the geopolitical shift that took place after the war, he wrote: “New York offered simultaneously an image of a world already finished in Europe and the image of another world that—little as we suspected then—would soon invade Europe.”39 Sartre reflected on this shift with a sort begrudging paternalism, and, in several essays about his postwar travels in the United States, he depicts the vertical metropolis as an urban jungle emerging from the Great Depression at the dawn of the atomic age. In his 1946 travel essay “New York, the Colonial City,” he depicts the skyscrapers as rising “vainly” from the ruins of the past, and imagining the possibility another catastrophe on the horizon, suggests that the city may ultimately be crossing the threshold from Myth into History:

The war has certainly taught the Americans that their country was the greatest power in the world. But the period of easy living is over; many economists fear a new depression. Thus, no more skyscrapers are being built. It seems they are too hard to rent….Far away I see the Empire State or the Chrysler Building reaching vainly toward the sky, and suddenly I think that New York is about to acquire a History and that it already possesses its ruins.40

When Simone de Beauvoir arrived in New York a year later, she was evidently more won over by the city. “I belong to New York, and New York belongs to me,” she wrote in her travel journal, which was published in book form with a dedication to Richard and Ellen Wright (whom she had befriended in Paris prior to her trip). She even invited her American lover Nelson Algren to visit her in New York instead of travelling back to Chicago to see him there or inviting him to visit her in France.41 “Paris has lost its hegemony,” she declared, and from that point on, French fantasies and fears about New York’s creative destruction increasingly contended with America’s power on a global scale.42 As Beauvoir saw it, “New York is a city of the world,”43 and its iconic verticality is itself a kind of myth, since it only exists as a cultural

39. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941” in The View From Afar, translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 262. 40. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 132. First published in Town and Country, 1946. 41. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day, translated by Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 256. 42. Ibid., 13. Clement Greenberg echoed this sentiment only a year later when he suggested that New York had replaced Paris as the new art capital of the world: “The conclusion forces itself that the main premises of western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial power and political power.” Quoted in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 172. 43. Beauvoir, 3.

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construct in relation to the natural “curves” of the earth and planetary “prehistory” of ecology and geology. After taking the “vertical journey” to the top of the Empire State Building and gazing out around her, she concluded: “I see New York as a piece of the virgin planet. The rivers, archipelago, curves and peninsula belong to prehistory…This city has only just been born; it covers a light crust of rocks older than the Flood.”44

44. Ibid., 32.

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