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Introduction: Dreaming of Infrastructure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Patricia Yaeger
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Extract

Baghdad, Banda Aceh, Beirut, Detroit, Dhaka, Harare, New Orleans. In these times chronicling the devastation and annihilation of cities—through capital flight, natural disaster, slum eviction, and war—I gravitate to stories about restoring ruined cities. Halfway through Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's novel about the firebombing of Dresden, we find an eccentric scene. After surviving Dresden's conflagration, Billy Pilgrim, optician and ex-GI, escapes traumatic memories by becoming “unstuck in time” (93). He journeys with the Tralfamadorians, creatures from outer space who teach him to time-switch so that he can move fluidly through his own private and public histories. Finding a war movie intolerable, Pilgrim imagines it in reverse: “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.” Pilgrim changes space by changing time. German guns suck bomb fragments from wounded American airmen as “the formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (93–94). How can we shelter or care for, how can we nurture, the ruined city in the belly of the text?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 1: Special Topics Cities , January 2007 , pp. 9 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2007

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