The graveyard and the garden: Reading connectivities in Rana Dasgupta’s “The Changeling”

Abstract

In the novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), Rana Dasgupta explores the contemporary age of globalization as a time of chaotic change. Tokyo Cancelled is composed as a story cycle of 13 tales. This article focuses on one of these tales in particular, “The Changeling”. “The Changeling” relates the tumultuous experiences of Bernard, who is a changeling and archetypal stranger in the pestilence-ridden city of contemporary Paris. The article explores the juxtaposition of systemic and organic networks as the central trope through which Dasgupta explores change and connectivities in a global twenty-first-century moment. We argue that the story presents a process of symbolic transformation whereby the national capital changes into a global city. This change signifies a shift from a national towards a planetary perspective. “The Changeling” comprises at least two different kinds of networks which converge and conflate into one overarching web that is the metropolis: there is a systemic network of control materialized in Montparnasse graveyard and an organic network out of control manifested in a community garden where people congregate to tell stories. Indeed, Dasgupta revisits Benjaminian storytelling as a global networking practice which, while locally contextualized in an impromptu garden in Paris, hints at an awareness of worldwide connectivity.

They [our townsfolk] went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

Albert Camus, The Plague (1960/1947: 34)

In an interview following the publication of Tokyo Cancelled in 2005, Rana Dasgupta describes the challenges of finding a literary form that can reflect the contemporary reality of global networks:

Paradoxically, the more the world becomes interwoven the less it seems possible to tell a single, representative story of it. (Or possibly: the more suspicious we are forced to become of those single, representative stories that are told.) And yet the connections are real and lived. So how do you narrate this? (Dasgupta, qtd. in Crown, 2005: n.p.)

In Tokyo Cancelled, a snowstorm rages outside, and all flights into and out of the airport have been cancelled. Thirteen passengers on their way to Tokyo are stranded in the arrivals hall overnight and pass the time by telling stories. Tokyo Cancelled thus superimposes a twenty-first-century global outlook on the medieval story cycle. The hypermodern space of the airport is temporarily put out of action, and during the night it morphs into a site where ancient storytelling practices sprout fairy tales at once familiar and strange. High technology, Hollywood film stars, designer brands, and CEOs have entered the narrative space and appear alongside magic and monarchs. The stories are set in locations all over the world, from New York to Anatolia. Yet, the 13 storytellers do not elaborate upon the significance of the local settings of their stories. In fact, they seem to assume that their listeners are in possession of at least an imaginative sense of these locations. Apparently, there exists among these global air travellers a shared familiarity with the layout and connotations of these geographically distant parts of the world.

Each of the 13 stories constitutes a narrative complete in and of itself, but also links up with the other stories in the book through a common focus on globalization. As Dasgupta notes, the book is “a picture of the world in fragments” (Dasgupta, 2006a: 3). ¹ When considered in conjunction, these story fragments call attention to the echoes between people and places and intimate the possibility, indeed the reality, of a global imaginary. Tokyo Cancelled envisions the world as a vast network. Geographically remote places are depicted as intimately proximate, as events in one place ripple through global ties and manifest in distant locations, often in a mutated form. The collective stories operate as a network within which each individual tale is a node that adds to, and is informed by, the others.

The airport in the frame narrative of Tokyo Cancelled is symbolic of a contemporary global moment when superhuman speed and technological artifice often trigger isolation rather than exchange. By contrast, the snowstorm that cancels the flight to Tokyo epitomizes the uncontrollable forces of nature which transcend such artificial engineering. For a brief moment, the storm interrupts the perpetual movement that characterizes the airport and gives rise to unexpected, though transient, relationships. And these relationships offer the 13 travellers respite and chance for reflection. In Dasgupta’s airport the moment of interruption carries transformative potential. As the 13 strangers listen to each other’s stories, they are transformed from solitary “passengers” into “fellow travellers” (91). Correspondingly, Dirk Weimann argues that the passengers are able to perceive of themselves as a group once they “are no longer protected by the contractual solitude of the supermodern non-place; or, positively put, no longer overdetermined by the atomizing dictates of jet-age travel” (Weimann, 2009: n.p.). The interruption fosters the need for an imaginative reconsideration of the journey itself as a source of new possibilities and perspectives. The connection between the 13 travellers in the airport is a fleeting one. It lasts only for the time they are stranded in the airport. Yet, even as they continue on their solitary journeys the following morning, the brief meeting lingers in their minds as a “good story to tell” (383). In other words, it has fostered the seeds of potential future connections to other people in other places through storytelling.

This article focuses on one tale in Tokyo Cancelled’s story cycle, “The Changeling”, which relates the changeling Bernard’s tumultuous experiences in the pestilence-ridden city of contemporary Paris. It begins with a discussion of networks, and goes on to map Bernard’s quest as he meanders through the web of streets in the city of Paris, connecting with people and places on his way. The article zooms in on Bernard’s experiences of two Parisian locations in particular, namely, the dismal graveyard of Montparnasse and the beautiful courtyard garden of the small hotel where Bernard stays. These two locations are read as symbolic manifestations of the city’s gradual development from a national capital to a global city, respectively. The article concludes with a reflection on the changing status of changeling–strangers in an increasingly globalized and networked world.

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In Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, it is suggested here, the network serves as a primary structuring principle of the novel’s formal layout. Moreover, the network is also applied in the narrative as a literary trope that hints at a dynamic of connectivity and causality which governs our contemporary (global) moment. The network is comprised of a number of nodes and the ties that connect them. These ties make possible the circulation of products, whether the “products” are people, capital, fashions, violence — or, as is the case in “The Changeling”, songs and stories. In Connected (2011), Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler observe that there are two overall types of networks — organized, and organic:

For numerous reasons […], people come to occupy particular spots in the naturally and continuously evolving social networks that surround us. Organic networks have a structure, complexity and sheer beauty not found in organized networks, and their existence provokes questions about how they arise, what rules they obey, and what purpose they serve. (2011: 15)

The organized networks are formed from the top down, and therefore appear systematic and controlled in their topology. The dynamics of social networks are by contrast infinitely complex. They arise organically and thus their topology is elusive and unpredictable. Importantly, as relations between nodes evolve and alter over time, so too does the topology of the organic network continuously transmorph in effect. The speed and dexterity with which these networks operate make it an arduous task to discern their internal “logic” and to ascertain the position of any one node for a longer period of time.

Suggestively, network visualization software tends to position the node with most connections at the centre of the network, while nodes with only few or no connections are positioned on the periphery of the model. Visualized in this manner, it becomes clear that networks are in fact power grids. The more ties a node has, the more power or opportunity it has to influence and shape the network.

Any one network is but a segment of a wider matrix. No network is complete in and of itself. The network is comprised of compound constellations, each with its own dynamics, powers, and counter-powers. There are thus numerous competing (dis)orders within any one network, all making use of its virulent properties. Accordingly, the network contains at once the particular and the general, the local and the global. It contains simultaneously the individual node and its numerous connections. When examining the network, one becomes mindful of the confluence of these different scales, of the correlation between individual journeys and global schemes.

“The Changeling” can be seen as a node in the large (storytelling) network that is the novel Tokyo Cancelled. In the manner of a Chinese box, “The Changeling” in its turn also presents a number of nodes and interlocking networks. Thus, in “The Changeling”, the central node and character of the story, Bernard, wanders through the web of Parisian streets and links up with people and places. It is these examples of connectivity that this article explores as it maps Bernard’s movement through the city.

The plot of the story pivots on a smallpox pandemic in Paris as experienced by the changeling-in-disguise, Bernard. Changelings constitute an undesired and suspect minority, and so, when Bernard’s true identity is suddenly discovered, he is forced to abandon his successful life. Now homeless, he wanders the city and meets a mysterious stranger named Fareed, whose pitiful circumstances stir his compassion. Fareed suffers from an unusual malady. Rare plants grow inside his body and protrude painfully through his skin. Fareed knows that he is dying and longs to find “a new word. A word of the future, not of the past” (267). This word, he hopes, will illuminate the mysteries of life and death, and bridge his passage into an unknown future. Bernard decides to help Fareed, since, clearly, Fareed is too ill to continue the search himself. While Bernard searches for Fareed’s word, he situates the two of them in a nondescript hotel.

One might read the encounter between Bernard and Fareed through Bhikhu Parekh’s evocation of a new politics of identity suitable for a twenty-first-century globalized world. Parekh insists that although our identities are “three-dimensional”, comprising what he calls our personal, social, and human identities (2008: 9), we tend to place the greatest emphasis on our social identities and our potential cultural differences from other people’s social identities. However, Parekh holds, “[t]he increasing human interdependence brought about by our globalizing world has made the cultivation of human identity both possible and necessary to a degree previously unimagined” (2008: 28). Thus when Bernard helps Fareed, he could be said to activate his human identity, focusing on what the two strangers share and on their communalities through acts of kindness and curiosity.

On his quest for the new word, Bernard literally eavesdrops on the noise of the city, hoping to stumble upon the word by coincidence. However, as we shall see, the erupting pandemic hinders his search when the authorities divide the city into quarantined zones, the borders of which become increasingly rigid.

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According to Marc Augé, “[a] place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity” (1995: 77). Dasgupta’s “place” in “The Changeling” is Paris and it is what might be termed a “mega-place”, or a super-organism, containing a multiplicity of smaller places. Within the metropolis, two places are juxtaposed which relate a particular networked experience: Montparnasse Cemetery and the hotel’s small garden, respectively. The graveyard is an organized network, its stone rows carefully planned and managed. The garden, by contrast, is an “organic” web, which is haphazardly cultivated by people who assemble spontaneously because they hear Fareed’s hypnotically beautiful singing. Both locations are relational. However, the graveyard epitomizes a retrospective stasis, dedicated to structures of remembrance, while the garden opens up an expansive — even global — perspective. Thus, “The Changeling” comprises at least two different kinds of networks which converge and conflate into one overarching network that is the metropolis. There is a network of control materialized in Montparnasse Cemetery and a network “out of control” manifested in the garden that emerges as a place of storytelling. And so the network is invariably locally contextualized and rooted — it is not (only) a trope of connectivity, but also literalized as physical and material reality.

The smallpox epidemic in Paris erupts because there is an explosion at the Place de la Bastille, which unearths old sediments that contain the dormant virus. Prior to this explosion, Paris looks familiar to the reader. It is a thriving city full of people, music, conversations, and words. This is the relational city through which Bernard manoeuvres on his search for Fareed’s word, eavesdropping on “the conversations of the city” (269). The places Bernard seeks out are convergence points where people meet and talk: “train stations and hairdressers and betting shops; he spoke to school children and rabbis and beggars” (270). Yet Bernard’s initial approach seems an arbitrary one. He “looks through” and “glances over” (268) random pieces of text and “overhears half-conversations” and “snatches of television” (270). As Fareed’s illness progresses, however, his quest takes on a sense of urgency. He is thus forced to become more systematic, although no less hit-and-miss: “tackling one or two arrondissements each day, in numerical order, and thus tracing a spiral out from the centre of Paris towards its periphery” (270). Since Bernard wanders the city of Paris, it is tempting to read him as a flâneur, that archetypal Parisian walker. However, the discourse associated with flânerie, developed in Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire, problematizes this reading. The idle flâneur enjoys purposeless strolling, wandering aimlessly and leisurely in the Parisian arcades that embody a world in miniature (1985: 37). This loafer enjoys what we might call a visual economy — he is first and foremost an observer. Bernard, in contrast, walks purposefully relying on audition, rather than sight — he is a listener. As a changeling–stranger he cannot afford, nor is he allowed, to adopt the leisurely pose of the flâneur. Bernard has been outed, and ousted, and he is tasked with a moral imperative — to find a word for the future that will ease the passage from life to death of another stranger. And unlike Michel de Certeau’s “spectator”, or walker, who reads the city, “the urban ‘text’” (1984: 93) that “he is constantly exploring” (1984: 91), Bernard listens to people’s conversations. Paris under siege is no longer de Certeau’s “planned and readable city” (1984: 93), but rather an unreadable city buzzing with noise and confusion.

As time passes and the smallpox epidemic continues to plague the city, Bernard’s movements are hindered by the escalating numbers of physical barriers erected by the government. Trying to prevent the spread of the smallpox epidemic, the city authorities do their utmost to “seal off the exposed population” (271):

Their objective was to plan the complex task of slicing up the city with barricades so that all movement, and therefore all spread of the disease, would eventually cease. The urban planner presented his vision: first, steel fences along all the major boulevards, cutting the city into large sections, and then finer and finer networks of barricades within those sections. The increasingly dense fractal patterns that appeared on the wall-sized map of Paris looked precise and beautiful. “Thank God for Haussmann”, someone said. (274)

The layout of streets designed by Haussmann during the mid-nineteenth century serves as a template for the government’s barricades. A rigid net of control is cast upon the streets of Paris from above, attempting to monitor and control all interaction and exchange between people. The pattern that emerges is rectilinear and, as such, inherently artificial in its form, the steel from which the barricades are made emphasizing its inorganic, lifeless character. This imposed network appears systematic and straightforward, and is reminiscent of what Andy Merrifield labels “neo-Haussmannization”, a “ruling class strategy for plundering and reorganizing the world” imposed from above that enforces “a new process of divide and rule” (2014: 29). Relying on the military, steel grilles, and barricades, the authorities create borders which seem at first glance impenetrable. Ironically, the idea of a network seems to suggest perpetual flow, yet here it becomes a means of filtering and hindering movement: a steel “net” cast over the city which serves to keep people firmly “in place”. For the Parisian authorities these barricades are certainly power grids, manifestations of their, ideally, unfailing sovereignty. These obstacles halt the conversational babble that characterizes the metropolitan impulse of unending activity:

With the human beings, all the words seemed to have gone, too. There were no newspapers, no leaflets, no graffiti. The trash bins seemed to have been removed. Even the advertisements and the shop signs had mostly disappeared. Only the city’s skeleton still bore its labels: traffic signs, stone inscriptions, street names. (278)

The fairy-tale imagery here develops the representation of Paris symbolically as a super-organism. Whereas the city was full of life before the quarantine, it is now described as a skeleton, stripped of vital organs and living tissue. Like the bones in a body, the city’s streets operate as a vast connective system that joins its distinctive parts. The steel barricades comprise a comparably “fractal pattern”. They dissect the city into quarantined zones and thereby fracture the connective edifice that holds the metropolis together as a unity. Consequently, rid of its lively crowds and conversations — the city’s lifeblood — Paris is reduced to an inanimate skeleton. When all life has been thus drained from the national capital, Bernard’s search leads him to Montparnasse Cemetery, appropriately representing the stagnation and ensuing “death” of the surrounding city, while at the same time, as Lewis Mumford claims about the necropolis, “[t]he city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed, the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city” (1989/1961: 7). The graveyard is thus anchored to the past, while simultaneously connected to the future:

The quiet order of the place was relaxing. It was a city in its own right, this rectilinear metropolis of the dead: But it was a city that did not assault you with its scale, one built for the size human body. On every side of the large expanse on the cemetery he could see the buildings of Paris: 1970s apartment blocks, Montparnasse Tower of course, and, towards the Seine, a number of newer corporate towers. And beyond them — were those the spires of La Défense? (278–79)

In its rectilinearity, the site mirrors the precision and artificiality of the government’s barricades. The graveyard is a small-scale facsimile of the dissected city. Like the barricaded metropolis, it is void of human intercourse and conversation. Even visitors who come to commune with the dead enter into what is, in fact, a non-meeting. There can be no real exchange in the graveyard, since any attempt at communication with its inhabitants must necessarily be a monologue with only the dead as audience. In terms of communication, the site is a place of total stasis. If, as Augé suggests, place is defined as relational, then the graveyard offers only a non-productive relationality.

Encroached by the enormous cityscape, although in itself a “large expanse”, the cemetery is dwarfed. Indeed, embodiments of an ever-developing hyper-modernity, the skyscrapers provide a stark contrast to the fixed comprehensibility and order of the “metropolis of the dead”. Whereas the architecture of Paris attests to a state of continuous expansion and perpetual mutation, the engravings of the tombs are carved in stone and therefore symbolically fixed in time and space. By juxtaposing the grounded, knowable space of the cemetery dedicated to the past, and the hypermodern vistas of skyscrapers that extend beyond the horizon, Dasgupta envisions Paris as a conglomerate. Like Augé’s sense of place, Paris here palimpsestically incorporates the structures of its past and consequently exists in a relation to history that is physically manifested in its architecture. Haussmann’s nineteenth-century plans for the rebuilding of Paris as a national capital are coupled with contemporary structures that represent Paris as a metropolis. The scale and purpose of the corporate towers in the distance bear testimony to an outlook that reaches far beyond the nation and emphasizes the continuously growing city as a global metropolis rather than merely a national capital. The architecture suggests an outward-looking perspective at odds with the dense pattern of steel barricades that sections Paris into ever-smaller zones of isolation. Thus, Paris appears here as a non-containable space that embodies past-present-and-future simultaneously — it has become a global city.

Saskia Sassen has coined the term “global city” to signal “the specificity of the global as it gets structured in the contemporary period” (2005: 28), which is manifested in “the existence of a series of transnational networks of cities” (2005: 29), twenty-first-century Paris being one such global city. The “networked cross-border dynamics among global cities”, Sassen insists, includes a diversity of domains (2005: 31) — in Dasgupta it is the cultural domain manifested in songs and storytelling that is singled out, as we shall see. Furthermore, Sassen claims that the global is materialized in “specific places […] [typically] located in national territories” (2005: 32). Sassen’s conceptualization of global cities as a way of examining globalization, we hold, helps to illuminate Dasgupta’s thematization of the lived experience of globalization and the representation of a transformed, global Paris that we witness in “The Changeling”. “Global Paris” is not an oxymoron, but rather an expression of how the global is anchored in the local and connected with other global and local formations.

Initially, the stasis, or “peace”, of the graveyard leads Bernard to believe that it is a “better place for words to grow” (279). Perhaps he thinks thus, disillusioned as he is with the cacophony of the animated streets of Paris. Yet, perusing the frustrating brevity and repetitiousness of the tombstones, Bernard realizes that the cemetery cannot sprout new words without the spontaneous and unpredictable energy of human interaction. This realization is accentuated by the tombs which are decorated with cut flowers in vases. Contrary to Fareed’s growths that sprout continuously, these flowers are not rooted. They cannot grow, and will eventually wither and die. Thus, Bernard concludes, “There were no words here” (279). The site is indeed a city of the dead, a necropolis embedded within the metropolis.

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Although the authorities have at first glance been successful in putting an end to “all human intercourse” (271), descriptions of total stagnation are ambiguously coupled with revelations of continued activity and exchange. Everywhere Bernard finds traces of people’s transgressions: he sees a woman sleeping in the back of a car, and train carriages which have been occupied by families. There are cafés and shops still open. There are witch hunts for potential scapegoats and families afraid of separation are searching for their relatives. Although “virtually all economic activity in the city came to a halt” (272), signs of normality are everywhere. A pedestrian sovereignty is gradually taking over the streets, subverting the government’s steely power grid.

What the government fails to understand in its panic to contain the epidemic is that even when under siege the city is an organic network, defined by exchange between its myriad of inhabitants. The metropolis is, as it were, the epitome of human interaction. Accordingly, when Bernard first begins his search for a “word of the future”, he intuitively understands that he must pursue places where all kinds of exchange happen. Bernard stops for a cup of coffee and at one of the open cafés he encounters Albert Kenette, a corporate businessman, who patronizingly explains to the disparaging Bernard that he is “making mountains out of molehills […] You really should use your head. No barrier is for everyone. And the people for whom it is not always need their own way of getting through” (280). If the metropolis is the manifestation of hypermodernity, then Albert Kenette is its ultimate metropolitan citizen. With his understanding of the ephemeral nature of borders, he personifies the border-crossing dynamics of contemporary globalization. While many other inhabitants of Paris are fixed by the barricades, and minorities are hunted down in the streets, he cheerily observes the city from a coffee stand, “sipped at a cup of steaming coffee”, chatting “with a gallantry that verged on the absurd” (276). Significantly, Kenette is visually a man of the past, seemingly part of a cosmopolitan privileged elite. He wears bespoke clothes with a suave and blasé self-confidence that makes him look “completely out of place” to Bernard (276). Yet he is fully at home in the city, a man-about-town and man-of-the-world — an old-fashioned gentleman and a hypermodern businessman in one body. Kenette is elderly, yet “alert and energetic” (277). Arguably, he represents a strong link of past and present hierarchies. He embodies a temporal simultaneity akin to that of the metropolis. He masters the technology of borders and understands that they are primarily structures of the mind, artificially created and therefore able to be transcended. Indeed, his business card advertises the corporation “SynTime Inc.”, where he is the “Vice President”, and engaged in unspecified “global business processes”. The word SynTime is explained as “[a]n experience of time in which past and future moments exist simultaneously in the present” (281). Bernard gives the card to Fareed suggesting SynTime as the new word, although he intuits that it is a “useless” and “ugly word” (281). So he rips it up and throws the pieces out of the hotel window into “a semicircle of the tiny garden in which rusted chairs were grouped pathetically together” (282). Now deconstructed, the border-crossing knowhow presented by the global corporation becomes the seeds from which an impromptu and non-containable garden starts to grow.

The garden comprises a potent contrast to the torpid order of the graveyard. It is a fundamentally organic site that continuously sprouts life and creativity. “Seated in a chair in the middle of the garden” (282) in front of a campfire, Fareed now becomes the node from which an expansive network of imaginative border-crossing springs. With his daylong songs, full of “passion” and “mystery” (283), Fareed “transfixes” first Bernard then gradually an ever-expanding audience:

The hotel maid came to hang laundry up in the garden, and she also sat down to listen; a man appeared at the upstairs window of the house behind and stood watching for what must have been several hours […] The upstairs windows all around the garden filled with people who came to watch Fareed. Other guests in the hotel came down and sat down with Bernard […] Everyone liked it: some climbed over the walls from the surrounding houses to sit around it […] People broke down all the walls between the yards so they could congregate together to listen to the singing. They dug flowerbeds in the concrete and planted flowers and vegetables that they cultivated with care. The jumble of stone rectangles with their wooden sheds and garbage bins became almost a garden. (283–86)

Thus, Fareed draws people in, initiating an ever-widening social network of people. Social networks are, as we have seen, intrinsically chaotic and helter-skelter. In a similar fashion, the garden evolves in an unplanned, organic manner and is hidden from view. Contrasted with the rectilinearity of the graveyard and Haussmann’s elaborate grid of Parisian boulevards, this fecund site comprises a pedestrian grassroots movement that operates through creative human exchange. When people start to “occupy” the garden, it becomes a space of (re)production and rebellion. The stories that are passed by word of mouth develop into what de Certeau calls “spatial practice” in the sense that “every story is a travel story” (1984: 115) — the garden produces stories that travel and organically develop into new travelling stories in new places and spaces ad infinitum. Furthermore, and to draw on Andy Merrifield’s exploration of the new urban question again, we want to read the goings-on in the garden in the light of Merrifield’s elaboration of what he calls “dissenting vocabularies” that use city spaces and social media to express a new “collective solidarity” (2014: ix). Such rebellious voices “from below” — “urban social movements” (2014: 15) — are in opposition to the “neo-Haussmannization” imposed from above. If what happens in the garden can be classed as an example of urban insurrection, then the garden functions as an agora; in Merrifield’s words, it is a “new kind of common field […] filled with ordinary people” that is simultaneously “active and affective” (2014: 10). Such agoras, Merrifield suggests, are “for assemblies of the people, for people’s Assembly” (2014: 43); indeed, they are “citizens’ agora, in the space of the urban” and a meeting place “between virtual and physical worlds” (2014: 82–83). In such places, dynamic and connective relationships are constantly developing and create “a network of living, conjoined, organic spaces” (2014: 83), as we see in Dasgupta’s representation of the singing and storytelling sessions that take their point of departure in the Parisian garden. Indeed, it is a messy place, potentially revolutionary and seditious as it disobeys the systemic order of the steel barricades. It is born in — and out of — chaos. In a manner befitting the fairy tale, the garden is initially a secret place that enchants all who come in contact with its creative power expressed in singing and storytelling.

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Storytelling may be perceived as an ancient form of network(ing), the primary node being the storyteller, who is not the originator of the story, but merely its most proficient mediator and transmitter. The novel Tokyo Cancelled links up with medieval storytelling cycles and within the novel, the 13 stories seep into each other, yet simultaneously remain separate, individual stories. There is no one grand, unifying story or narrative, but multiple stories that link disparate nodes and are connected in multiple ways. Storytelling, Dengel-Janic writes, “connects people across boundaries of nation, ethnicity, gender, class, and culture”, and it is “a common terrain of conviviality […] a home away from home” (2014: 74). And in Fareed’s story (within the story “The Changeling”, within the larger story-frame of Tokyo Cancelled) storytelling is staged as a networking device. In the garden where the propitious pieces of the SynTime card have been thrown, a semicircle is formed and storytelling begins. Indeed, as observed by Dirk Weimann, “[n]arrative itself […] works as a redeeming force that revokes the sterility of the non-place” (2009: n.p.) that the city of Paris has become after the depopulation of its streets.

The storyteller Fareed is like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller, “someone who has come from afar” (1969: 84). He lives in Morocco and sings songs in French, Arabic, and several other languages that are unknown to Bernard (262): thus Bernard does not know “how to categorize him” (265). Benjamin’s storyteller is “a man who has counsel” for his listeners and who “takes what he tells from experience — his own and that of those who are listening to his tale” (1969: 86–87), thus fashioning a network of intertwined and interlinked stories. Storytelling is emphatically not something imposed (from above) and extrinsic to the teller, but rather a process that emerges from intrinsically local and even bodily experiences. “He has borrowed his authority from death”, Benjamin says about the storyteller (1969: 94). And it is indeed Fareed’s impending death that initiates the search for a new word, a language that can express his experience of dying. Yet stories about dying will only ever be stories about dying, not about having died — that ultimate experience can never be told after the fact: “If I could find the words to build a bridge from life to death […] one that I could venture on to and inspect before I finally have to cross it forever — I think it will make a difference” (267). Just as Bernard fails to find the word of the future, Fareed never manages to construct the bridge. In the end he relies on the powers of the imagination to alleviate his “terror” (266).

The storyteller, Benjamin insists, “joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel — not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage” (1969: 108). In “The Changeling” the Parisian population is “stalked by death” and in dire need of comfort, and so Fareed’s songs “moved among them faster even than the virus” (287). But, contrary to the smallpox epidemic let loose after the explosion at the Bastille, this viral storytelling is benign. It is also contagious. Etymologically, contagion comes from the Latin word contingere, meaning contact — and social intercourse, as we see in the garden, can have all kinds of (unexpected) effects and can affect those bodies that come into contact with each other in unexpected ways.

Furthermore, as Benjamin suggests, “storytelling is the art of repeating stories”, and this retelling “is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled” (1969: 91). When Fareed sits sagaciously in the middle of the garden, singing hypnotically, he draws in listeners, who weave their own stories out of his songs:

Fareed wrote nothing down, so whatever left the garden where he sang was through the singing of those who had heard him. People gathered at the points where three or more barriers converged and sang songs to each other; these then moved on to the next enclosures, and the next. They became the anthems of that terrible moment; but what travelled was more an idea than a set of texts, for the words were elaborated and misremembered at every turn. (287)

He is full of words which refuse to obey the static “network of barriers” (284) that limit free movement in the city outside the garden. Inside the garden, Fareed’s words sprout from his mouth as shoots are growing from his body (286). The double fecundity of verbal and bodily blossoming impregnates the listeners’ minds and imaginations: “[i]n the songs, people found thoughts that took root in their minds and burst open gloriously, and they were happy simply to listen and think” (286). The benign virus of the imagination is more powerful than the physical borders erected in the city to keep the malign virus at bay.

Benjamin’s storyteller has an aura about him (1969: 109), and so does Fareed; indeed, there “was too much of an aura about him” (287). He remains as mysterious and unknowable in death as he was in life. In “The Changeling”, the storyteller’s death can be aligned with W. H. Auden’s commemoration of the death of the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, in the poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939). Activating the traditional poetic theme of “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis” (art is long, life is short) Auden writes about the poet that “he became his admirers” in the sense that “[t]he words of a dead man ǀ are modified in the guts of the living.” Poetry, he writes in the poem, “survives ǀ a way of happening, a mouth”. In a similar fashion, Fareed’s songs are inscribed upon the body of Bernard — storytelling has a profoundly corporeal effect on the listeners securing its longevity. In an effort to comfort the dying man, Bernard “nestled in among roots and branches to hold Fareed’s wizened body in his arms” (289). There is a humane and compassionate ambience to this moment which offers a striking contrast to the artificial and steely isolation of the government’s grid. In their sleep, Fareed’s plants grow to enfold and encompass Bernard. In this organic tangle, this biotic connectivity, their bodies and spirits have “fused” (290): “Their bodies drew on a single reservoir of energy that was fast evaporating. He [Bernard] was now only the twitching half of a larger creature that was otherwise resigned to death” (291). Through his storytelling, Fareed has transfixed Bernard to such a dramatic extent that he draws him in completely. In this way the storyteller’s experience is physically transmitted to Bernard, his first listener, and literally engraved upon his body. Now intimately linked with Bernard, he whispers, “Finally — I do not die alone” (291). The storyteller’s death has become a social, or collective experience — and he has become his admirers.

In the story, Fareed’s connective words are effectively contrasted with those of the President of the Republic. In a “televised address to the nation” (272), the President informs his “brothers and sisters of France” that, “when all movement of people has been stopped it will be a simpler operation to administer them systematically. When these measures are complete, there will be nowhere for the disease to take refuge. We shall have triumphed” (273). Benjamin’s insight is useful in this connection too: he contrasts the art of storytelling — which comes from afar (both in a temporal and spatial sense) — with the dissemination of information, such as the President’s address, “which supplies a handle from what is nearest” (1969: 89). In this light, Fareed is the wise storyteller who comes to the hypermodern metropolis-under-siege to reinvigorate storytelling as a trope for organic exchange and connectivity. Paris is under siege not only from the pandemic, but also from the cold and sterile information disseminated by the authorities — from “Neo-Haussmannization”. But contrary to Benjamin, who in 1936 (when “The Storyteller” was published) bewails the fact that “by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information” (1969: 89), Dasgupta reveals that in the end, it is the fecund storytelling imagination that trumps sterile political information.

Fareed sings a final song before he dies. It is suggestively centred on a cycle of death and rebirth of the body. This cycle mirrors the aetiology of Paris, the super-organism. The explosion at the Bastille and the ensuing fracture of the city symbolically constitute its death and decomposition. However, Fareed’s song considers that death is, invariably, followed by rebirth:

Death was the midpoint of the body’s life: for the amount of time it takes for a body to become fully itself is also the amount of time it takes to decompose and become nothing again […] life began with the first fusion of two particles of dust that had been sundered, continued as they gathered more dust around them, and so built a skeleton on to which rotting flesh gradually fixed itself and began full and whole, and then — suddenly! — […] the spirit soared high even as the body was still pale and deathly. (289)

Like the two particles which are sundered in the song, Fareed and Bernard’s bodies fuse quite literally. Their collective efforts at putting into words the experience of death induce a seditious border crossing whereby people congregate in the garden to listen. The people of Paris who, as we have seen, may be considered the life of the metropolis, are at this point still “stalked by death” (287), full of disease caused by the epidemic. They may be considered in figurative terms as the “rotting flesh” of Paris, which here gradually fixes itself to the skeleton of streets. They gather in increasing numbers in an outward movement from the garden, breaking down walls and transgressing barriers. Fareed’s storytelling, then, is the spirit of the unfettered imagination that soars and, in contrast to the deadly smallpox, gives life and fertility to the metropolis and beyond. As the spirit eventually “descended to join the body that rose with pride to receive it” (289), so do Fareed’s songs, his spirit, spread throughout Paris and develop into a global “movement” (288). The superorganism that is Paris is the body of people who rise and receive the transformative powers of this creative life force. Like Bernard’s spiralling search for the word through the arrondissements of Paris, the imagination expands perceptions of geographical space: it links Paris with the rest of the world as Fareed’s songs are interpreted and reinterpreted all over the globe.

The imagination is, of course, inherently non-containable. And while oriented towards the future and changed through an imagery of organic rebirth, those appropriated songs also embody the past, recalling the moment in the garden when Fareed began his story. In his evocation of what he calls “the work of the imagination”, Arjun Appadurai insists that

[i]t is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighbourhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape. (2008/1996: 7)

Merrifield seems to concur and concludes his intervention into the new urban question on a hopeful note, investing optimism in people’s “capacity to act upon [the] imagination” (2014: 131). That “collective promise” (2014: 131) is what is brought into infectious life in the garden. In Dasgupta’s story, storytelling and acts of the imagination are collective endeavours, the result of social exchange and human intercourse. Fareed’s songs become the staging ground for a new mode of being in and thinking about the global city. While previously a bounded entity, the new, post-epidemic Paris has transformed into a globally-oriented urban site. And it is the changeling Bernard who best embodies this transformation.

*

The tenth story in Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled is entitled “The Changeling”. The changeling is, of course, Bernard, and it is to all intents and purposes his story we are reading. He is the central focalizer of the story and what happens to him is the story’s plotline. One way of reading Bernard is as the archetypal stranger. In George Simmel’s classic evocation of the stranger who “comes today and stays tomorrow” (1950: 402), this figure is caught uneasily in the double bind of coming and going. Indeed, “[t]he mysterious arrivals and departures” (258) of Dasgupta’s changeling population create anxiety in the native Parisians — they do not know who these strange creatures are and cannot map their comings and goings. Zygmunt Bauman sees the changeling as a former stranger, “a person who can pick and choose, who has the freedom which the ‘just so natives’ do not possess, whose status can never have the same degree of solidity, finality and irreversibility as that of the natives” (1991: 78). Consequently, Bauman writes, “[t]he loyalty which is simply taken for granted in the case of the natives […] calls for suspicious and vigilant scrutiny in the case of yesterday’s stranger” (1991: 78). Indeed, in “The Changeling”, changelings are even perceived as subhuman. Only their “spouses, lovers, and friends” consider them “more human than the rest of us” (259):

Politicians, citizens and the media all agreed that neither liberty, equality, nor fraternity could be extended to creatures that had no long-term loyalty to the nation or even to the species […] there was a voice that opposed these “witch-hunts” […]. Changelings, they said, were more human than the rest of us. For their humanity, unlike that of everyone else, was earned at great cost […] it was a supreme, self-conscious effort of will. (259)

Bernard is in Paris, but (still) not (quite) of Paris. The received way of thinking about belonging in the city and the nation relies on a binary, bounded politics. There are citizens who belong, and changelings who emphatically do not. The latter’s allegiance to the nation is questioned and the ideals of the French Revolution therefore cannot be extended to those creatures that are classified as infrahuman. Instead, as strangers they are subjects of suspicion. This attitude to strangers envisions Paris as a bounded space defined by metaphorical barriers that bar outsiders from participation. While these binaries of belonging are indeed mental constructs, borders of the mind, as it were, they represent a way of thinking that also manifests physically through the government’s barricaded approach to contain the epidemic. Furthermore, unlike the soaring imagination discussed above, this perspective is myopic and narrow in focus. It operates in a constricting and confining manner, with a clear-cut isolationist vision of who belongs and who does not. It is accompanied by an equally narrow notion of Paris as a fixed and stable geographical space akin to the gated confines of Montparnasse Cemetery. Significantly, like the graveyard, such a gated outlook epitomizes an anachronistic vision of belonging in (potentially) pulsating twenty-first-century Paris.

When a member of the changeling population is identified as such, he is made to occupy the peripheries of the city. Within its overarching network, he thus constitutes a tangential node. On the day of the explosion of the Bastille, Bernard is ousted and forced to leave behind his former life as a married and successful investment banker. Notably, immediately after the explosion and the propitious meeting with Fareed, his tangential experience of Paris is fundamentally altered. The combined forces of the explosion at the Bastille and the storm that rages on that same night disrupt the order of the city:

Bernard walked around to see into the crater. It opened up into the Métro. Water was pouring in over the layers of Third-Republic brickwork. Steam rose ghoulishly from within. Bernard looked at the rows of bodies laid out in rows in the square and shivered […] He wandered through the night, assessing his situation. The life he had been leading was certainly over. (261)

The Bastille is depicted here in terms of a bloody battlefield post-combat. The explosion causes a fatal wound to the capital, the symbolic heart of the nation. The established foundations of the nation are shattered by the violent expansion; its traditional structures are demolished by the immense release of energy. Notably, this destruction is not superimposed from without, but seems to erupt, spontaneously, from within the city. The Bastille is highly evocative of a national French mythology, intimating, as it does, the birth of the modern republican nation. Thus the explosion can be read as signifying the death of the idea of a modern nation, as envisioned in established boundaries and a predominantly homogenous population. Conceivably, the death of the nation entails a redefinition of belonging and, consequently, also of its archetypal stranger, Bernard:

The storm had passed, and Paris basked under clear summer skies that smelled gloriously of clean roofs and damp earth. The day was so astonishing that people stopped in their tracks to admire it; the buildings were radiant, faces passed each other with an otherworldly clarity, and the trees sighed and sparkled. Bernard sat on the edge of a fountain to think and to watch it all turn about him […] His face was wet with rainbow spray, and yet in the middle of all this he felt clear-headed and alive. (267–68)

Significantly, the previously peripheral Bernard now finds himself in the middle of city life, feeling alive. This passage provides a stark contrast to the deadly atmosphere of the Bastille. In fact, it seems like a baptismal moment. The rain has flooded ancient structures and the city emerges cleansed and fresh. Indeed, Paris is seen through Bernard’s eyes as an almost paradisiacal place full of renewed life. With the earthy smells, the radiant trees and the fountain, Paris resembles a locus amoenus, a pleasant and transformative place. Released from its constricting myths of national uniformity rooted in the eighteenth century, the former, and now transformed, stranger takes centre stage for a new vision of the future. Bernard has finally achieved a “right to the city”, to echo Henri Lefebvre’s description of what he calls a “transformed and renewed right to urban life” (2000/1996: 168), through a radical change both in himself and in what has now become the new global city of twenty-first-century Paris. As in Fareed’s experience, death is not final but precedes transmutation or rebirth. In the contemporary moment of global conversation, the myth of national uniformity expires and gives way to a new perspective where there are no outside or outsiders, but an expansive network of global connectivity.

“The Changeling” captures a moment of transition into an age of network powers, systemic and organic alike. Thus, Paris in “The Changeling” looks remarkably akin to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s prominent, albeit much-debated, theorizations of globalization in Empire (2002) and Multitude (2006). Hardt and Negri hold that a new kind of networked sovereignty has overturned previous forms of power. In this view, networks are highly influential power grids, the ties of which operate like lines of force that may be activated for both regulatory and democratic purposes:

there are two faces to globalization. On one face, [globalization] spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. Globalization, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents. (2006: xiii)

In “The Changeling”, such opposing forces battle for dominion. While the French government takes control of Paris by military force to “protect” the citizens from further contamination, a “living alternative” to its systemic sovereignty grows within the city (Hardt and Negri, 2006: xiii). As the authorities exert their sovereignty through a regulatory and unbending power grid, the people of Paris, and eventually of the world, gather across barriers to plant new “organic” spaces for innovation and exchange. In these gardens, fellow citizens meet up, trade stories and listen to one another. The poetry gardens represent a global, humanist perspective centred on situated local action.

*

In the introduction to the essay collection A New World Order (2001), written at the turn of the most recent century, Caryl Phillips assesses the globalized present thus:

The new global conversational babble. These days we are all unmoored. Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. […] In this new world order of the twenty-first century we are all being dealt an ambiguous hand, one which may eventually help us to accept the dignity which informs the limited participation of the migrant, the asylum-seeker, or the refugee. As the laborious certainties of the old order continue to fade, and the volume of the global conversation increases, ambiguity embraces us all. (2001: 6)

In “The Changeling”, the laborious certainties of the nation are superseded by an emergent new order of global conversation and human interaction. With its unprecedented level of movement and exchange, globalization has increased the probability of contagion through expansive networks which, more often than not, cut across national barriers. Contagion, as we have seen, is considered here in a broad sense; as a virulent spread of anything from lethal pandemics to visionary social interaction. By enforcing the cessation of movement and exchange, the government turns Paris into a stagnant site, a graveyard. Yet by contrast, Bernard and Fareed, migrants and strangers in the city, initiate, and eventually embody, an organic cycle of continuous metamorphosis through storytelling. Through acts of kindness and compassion they activate their common human identity and create convivial and uncontrolled storytelling encounters that transcend notions of strangeness and unbelonging. Like Fareed and Bernard, Paris, too, becomes more than it was. In this way, the central characters mirror the changing city. Clearly, then, for Dasgupta, cities carry symbolic weight. The metropolis is to be understood in his vision as a microcosm of a new world order:

The idea of the total, centralized, maximally efficient, planned city has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement; its homogenizing obsession has induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess and life forms in chaotic variety. (Dasgupta, 2006b: 38)

Spreading throughout the globe, Fareed’s songs establish an imaginative connectivity that ties global Paris to the world through a shared, planetary practice. While that linking practice surpasses national mythologies, it is nonetheless locally rooted in convivial and jumbled interaction growing out of an affective agora in an impromptu Parisian garden.