I very quickly became aware of the fissures and dislocations within Bypasses and Flyovers, written by Mrazek. His language drifted off, mentioning a small detail along the roadside in Jakarta, to then veer off into a quote from some 20th century philosopher, only to return back to his own positionality. The style reminded me distinctly of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, one of my most treasured travel companions. The abstract and geometrical descriptions of Jakarta as well as the authors guiding tone as he is trying to uncover secret glimpses of the city’s past lives were very reminiscent of Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan of Venice in Calvino’s book. Both accounts told by Mrazek and Calvino were grounded in a single locale, and yet they weave in disparate snippets of concrete observations with the heaviness of human experiences.
Bypasses and Flyovers almost felt as if Mzarek was speaking to us readers as Marco Polo spoke to Kublai Khan. We were drifted from toddlers on the street side, up to beer drinking on the sixteenth floor of a high rise. He allows us to imagine walking a half hour or driving five minutes to Sukarno’s old plot. He takes us back in time to revolutions past, while we are also sitting in the present moment with Sukarno’s widow, while also reminded us that is also past. Not only is the depiction of Roosseno’s dreamed Jakarta as a “metropolis reflection” positioned in response to European architecture at the time, but also feels in conversation with the sentimentality towards a city weighed down by history dredged up by Calvino.
Both Calvino and Mzarek make their cities feel timeless, while also so deeply submerged in time and space gone by. Is this what makes them both “sublime”?
I could go on infinitely comparing the two, putting one into the context of the other. Every bit of Mzarek’s piece oozes Calvino’s surrealist, dream-like style, while also managing to root in the lived realities of Jakarta residents.
Extractions from Bypasses and Flyovers:
“sublime places, architectures, revolution and stars”
“In his death, Mr Roosseno has been united with the fourfold – modern, historical, architectural, avant-garde, metropolitan fourfold – Aristotle-turned-Le-Corbusier fourfold – (1) highways (earth), (2) railways (fire), (3) waterways (water), and (4) airways (air).”
“Tens, and about eight o’clock hundreds, of people are here to do their sporting on the road”
“The mere jazziness of the street had done the trick by itself”
“asphalted”
Jakarta as a “post-Palladian, post-colonial and almost post-modern metropolis, one may almost convince oneself that ‘The community of human destinies is experienced in the anonymity of non-place, and in solitude’ (Augé, 1995).”
“ ‘Dialogue is the rhythmic interruption of the logos, the space between the replies, each reply apart from itself retaining for itself an access to sense that is only its own, an access of sense that is only itself’ (Jean-Luc Nancy, 1997) .”
Questions:
How can anthropologists fuse themselves into a writing without drawing away from the realities of the people being studies?
How to construct an ethnography in a non-linear way while still painting a holistic picture?
How to draw from Phenomenology ways in which a writer can contribute multi-nodal/multiscaler/multidimensional aspects of a given space?
~ mc
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