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COMICS AS A RESEARCH
PRACTICE

This book proposes a novel creative research practice in geography based on comics.
It presents a transdisciplinary approach that uses a set of qualitative visual methods and
extends from within the geohumanities across literary spatial studies, comics, urban
studies, mobility studies, and beyond.
Written by a geographer–cartoonist, the book focuses on ‘narrative geographies’
and embraces a geocritical and relational approach to examine comic book geographies
in pursuit of a growing interest in creative, art-based experimental methods in the
geohumanities. It explores comics-based research through interconnections between art
and geography and through theoretical and methodological contributions from scholars
working in the fields of the social sciences, humanities, literary geographies, mobilities,
comics, literary studies, and urban studies, as well as from visual artists, comics authors,
and art practitioners. Comics are valuable objects of geographical interest because of
their spatial grammar. They are also a language particularly suited to geographical
analysis, and the ‘geoGraphic novel’ offers a practice of research that has the power
to assemble and disassemble new spatial meanings. The book thus explores how the
‘geoGraphic novel’ as a verbo-visual genre allows the study of geographical issues,
composes geocentred stories, engages wider and non-specialist audiences, promotes
geo-artistic collaboration, and works as a narrative intervention in urban contexts.
Through a practice-based approach and the internal perspective of a geographer–
cartoonist, the book provides examples of how geoGraphic fieldwork is conducted
and offers analysis of the processes of ideation, composition, and dissemination of
geoGraphic narratives.

Giada Peterle is a cultural geographer, lecturer in literary geography at the University

of Padua, Italy, and cartoonist. She works on ‘narrative geographies’, experimenting
with mobile methods, creative mapping, and art-based practices. Her work on
literary geographies, comic book cartographies, graphic geography, and carto-fiction
is published in international journals like Social & Cultural Geography and Cultural
Geographies.
Routledge Research in Culture, Space and Identity

The Routledge Research in Culture, Space and Identity Series offers a forum for original
and innovative research within cultural geography and connected fields. Titles within
the series are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic
and captivating topics. This series provides a forum for cutting edge research and
new theoretical perspectives that reflect the wealth of research currently being
undertaken. This series is aimed at upper-level undergraduates, research students
and academics, appealing to geographers as well as the broader social sciences, arts
and humanities.

Space, Taste and Affect

Atmospheres That Shape the Way We Eat
Edited by Emily Falconer

Geography, Art, Research

Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities
Harriet Hawkins

Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place

Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies
Mary Modeen and Iain Biggs

Comics as a Research Practice

Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame
Giada Peterle

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Research-in-Culture-Space-and-Identity/book-series/CSI
COMICS AS A RESEARCH
PRACTICE
Drawing Narrative Geographies
Beyond the Frame

Giada Peterle
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Giada Peterle
The right of Giada Peterle to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-52465-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-52466-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05806-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Serafina
CONTENTS

List of figures ix
Acknowledgementsxiii
Preface: constellations of urban comics xv

1 Introduction: enacting comic book geographies 1

Comic book geographies in practice 2
A geocritical reading of comic book geographies 7
Comic book geographies in practice: sketching
the geoGraphic novel 9

PART I
Assembling comics for creative interventions
in urban space 21

2 Comics as assemblages: building urban stories in the public sphere 23

For a ‘street geography’: drawing in public space 23
Comics as geo-artistic collaborations 28
Let it speak! The voice of a building 33
Reading paths through public space 41

3 Drawing urban comics: ethnoGraphic strolling across

‘peripheral’ neighbourhoods 55
Comics behind the scenes: authoring a geoGraphic narrative 55
Travel at the centre of a comic book anthology 62
viii Contents

Walk and draw, map and tell! CartoGraphic strolling

in Arcella (Padua) 70
Bridging pages and places: visual metaphors and geoGraphic
chronotopes 79
Comic book geographies beyond the frame 87

PART II
Moving comics from representation to practice 99

4 Graphic mobilities: mobile practices, bodies, and

landscapes of movement in comics 101
The representation of movement in comics 101
Mobility and the geohumanities 115

5 Doing comics on the move: an autoethnographic account

of geoGraphic fieldwork 121
Mobile storylines along the tramway in Turku 121
Storying memories, interviews, and encounters along the route 127
Composing urban archives: objects and visuals as
narrative triggers 137
GeoGraphic fieldwork in practice: mobile methods, creative
practices, and the researcher–cartoonist beyond the frame 148

Index167
FIGURES

1.1 TAMassociati assemble the comics page as an architectural building. 6

1.2 International geopolitics, conflicts, struggles for civil rights in the
works of graphic journalism by the Italian artist–activist Gianluca
Costantini.10
1.3 CartoGraphics: when comics become maps. Author’s illustration. 12
1.4 CartoGraphics: when maps become comics. Author’s illustration. 13
1.5 Following a long-lasting tradition in comics, Italian graphic
journalist Claudio Calia reflects on his positionality as a comics
author by representing himself as a character in the comics page. 16
1.6 Italian cartoonist Eliana Albertini draws new directions in comic
book geographies. 17
2.1 Scattered narrative pieces of the comics story A Station of Stories
by Mónica Bellido Mora on the ground in front of the main
façade of the train station. 27
2.2 Excerpts from the storyboard of Mónica Bellido Mora’s A Station
of Stories.32
2.3 The ideal entry point of Mónica Bellido Mora’s comics story: the
train station of Padua introduces itself, while the city is still asleep
all around it. 38
2.4 We are towards the ideal end of the reading path of A Station of
Stories: another day is almost over for the train station of Padua. 39
2.5 One panel of the comics story by Mónica Bellido Mora hanging
on the walls of the local public transport ticket office, in the
square just in front of the train station of Padua. 40
2.6 Information signs in the train station become part of the visual
patterns in Mónica Bellido Mora’s comics story, creating a visual
bridge between architectural and narrative space. 42
x Figures

2.7 Unpredicted encounters, reading paths, and mobile trajectories

around the art-installation. Geographer Davide Papotti reading
A Station of Stories during the inauguration of the Street
Geography public art exhibition. 44
2.8 Performing ‘street geographies’: from left to right, the
geographer, Tania Rossetto, the illustrator, Mónica Bellido
Mora, and the editor-in-chief of BeccoGiallo, Guido Ostanel,
during the inauguration of the Street Geography exhibition on 14
September 2018.49
3.1 Occasional encounters with the key informants in the
neighbourhood: Emiliano Bon (Xena Association) and Adriano
Cancellieri speaking at the crossroad between Arcella Boulevard
and Tiziano Aspetti Street in Padua. 58
3.2 Bodies, embodiment, and positionality in the field: a portrait of
mine while walking in the Arcella neighbourhood. 59
3.3 The cartoGraphic mosaic on the book cover of the comic book
anthology Quartieri, 2019. 61
3.4 Collecting unheard female voices in the neighbourhood:
a walk-along interview with Ferdousi in the Arcella
neighbourhood, in Padua. 66
3.5 Assemblages of polyphonic voices: contrasting narratives about
the contested area around Bernina Street in Padua are represented
through the assemblage of stereotyped titles in the local
newspapers and coloured images of cultural events taking place in
the streets. Author’s illustration in Quartieri.69
3.6 Walking with characters: during a walk-along interview,
13-year-old Somrat guides us to his favourite place in the
neighbourhood, a bridge over the train rails connecting Arcella
with the city centre of Padua. Author’s illustration in Quartieri.71
3.7 Drafting the narrative map: from the first page of the comics
story, mapping practices play a central role and contribute to the
construction of a cartoGraphic narrative. Author’s illustration in
Quartieri.73
3.8 Walking on the talking-map! The map introduces itself as the
non-human narrator. Author’s illustration in Quartieri.76
3.9 The tramline is a mobile chronotope, a symbolic means of
connection that provides linearity in both intradiegetic and
extradiegetic space. Author’s illustration in Quartieri.86
3.10 A neighbourhood ‘at the heart of the city’: a visual metaphor
shows how the map of Arcella is now filled with emotional
value. Author’s illustration in Quartieri.92
4.1 Landscapes of movement in Jon McNaught’s Kingdom.104
4.2 Reading movement in time through the fragmentation of space
in Jon McNaught’s Kingdom.105
 Figures xi

4.3 The everyday commuting practice activates a process of self-

reflection, moving the author’s gaze from the story of a daily
routine to that of an entire lifetime in Williams’ Commute.112
4.4 The individual body (on the left) is part of a broader urban
body, represented by the crowd of commuters (on the right)
i Williams’ Commute.114
5.1 The expanding map of the horse tramway in Turku. Author’s
illustration. Page 1, from Lines.125
5.2 Past memories and new practices cross along the Linnankatu.
Author’s illustration. Page 4, from Lines.132
5.3 Bus No. 1 follows the former tram route. Author’s illustration.
Page 5, from Lines.133
5.4 Riding the bus, nowadays. Author’s illustration. Page 6,
from Lines.134
5.5 Riding the tram, in the past. Author’s illustration. Page 7,
from Lines.135
5.6 Archivists at the Museum Centre of Turku: the visual patterns
suggest translating archival photographs into comics strips. 141
5.7 Entering the yellow cars, exploring the narrative set: the fragile
bodies of the tram cars preserved in the depot of the Museum
Centre of Turku. 142
5.8 Conductresses’ leather bags have stories to tell. Author’s
illustration. Page 8, from Lines.144
5.9 Margit Nurmi’s grey uniform. Author’s illustration. Page 9,
from Lines.145
5.10 A stratigraphy of visual memories from the Archive. Author’s
illustration. Page 10, from Lines.146
5.11 Perfmorming the map with Mikko Laaksonen. Author’s
illustration. Page 14, from Lines.153
5.12 Performing digital and paper maps of Föli in Turku. Author’s
illustration. Page 20, from Lines.154
5.13 Women’s mobile revolution. Author’s illustration. Page 21,
from Lines.155
5.14 Author’s illustration. Page 22, from Lines.160
5.15 Three generations of women meet on a bus ride. Author’s
illustration. Page 23, from Lines.161
5.16 Mobile archives of memories. Author’s illustration. Page 24,
from Lines.162
5.17 The geographer–cartoonist during geoGraphic fieldwork.
Author’s illustration. Page 25, from Lines.163
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are several people to whom I owe my thanks for coming to the end of this
book. First, I am infinitely grateful to Marco for supporting me with patience and
love over this difficult year, and to my family for trusting me without any hesitation.
Grazie mamma, grazie papà, grazie Davide. Thanks to my whole family. A special
thank goes to Tania Rossetto for her invaluable support as an inspiring scholar and
patient supervisor who always supported my sometimes-crazy ideas. Grazie Tania.
Many thanks also to Juliet J. Fall and Jason Dittmer for their inspirational works on
comic book geographies as well as their encouraging generosity, to Adriano Cancel-
lieri for his relentless enthusiasm and for being a comics character with me and to
all the cartoonists and members of Tracce Urbane who contributed to Quartieri.
Thanks to all my colleagues at the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences
and the Ancient World and at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the
Humanities at the University of Padua, and especially to Andrea Pase and Mauro
Varotto, and my friends Sara Luchetta, Laura Lo Presti, Margherita Cisani, Daniele
Codato, and Mauricio Vergara. Thanks to the many colleagues who supported me
during this journey, and especially to Nattie Golubov and Francesco Visentin, Davide
Papotti, Marcello Tanca, and Francesco Vallerani. I am also infinitely grateful to the
Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities for hosting me and especially to
Veronica Della Dora for her support and supervision, to Sasha Engelmann and Har-
riet Hawkins for being such inspiring creative geographers, and to all the members
of the Department of Geography at the Royal Holloway University of London. I am
profoundly thankful to Jason Finch for having me at the Åbo Akademi in Turku as
well as to Lieven Ameel and to all the members of both the ALUS (Association for
Literary Urban Studies) and the ‘PUTSPACE – Public Transport as Public Space in
European Cities’ HERA project. Thanks to all the members of the group “Comics e
geografia” of the AGeI. Finally, I want to sincerely thank Guido Ostanel and Mattia
Ferri of the publishing house BeccoGiallo, Nobrow Press, Abrams ComicArts, the
xiv Acknowledgements

Museum Centre of Turku, and all the artists who provided me with the permission
to reproduce their artworks in this book: Eliana Albertini, Claudio Calia, Gianluca
Costantini, Jon McNaught, Mónica Bellido Mora, TAMassociati, and Erin Williams.
Last, but not least, I would like to thank all my lovely friends whose support made it
possible to go through this journey. Grazie.
PREFACE: CONSTELLATIONS OF
URBAN COMICS

The geography of my relationship with comics has deep roots. As a kid, I remember
waiting with my brother Davide for the next issue of Mickey Mouse to come out,
particularly in the summer, when the issues of the comic book marked the passing
of time. As we grew up, the never-ending wait became less exciting. I became a
teenager and, apparently, I had more serious things to deal with. If I were asked
to trace a map of my comic book geographies, that period would be a big ‘black
hole’, very similar to that drawn by Charles Burns in his graphic novel to represent
the terrifying metamorphosis of becoming an adult. Yet, I remember the precise
coordinates of the moment in which I met comics again. It was Christmas 2006,
when my cousin Lele gifted me with Babel Vol. 2 by French cartoonist David B. At
that time, I was a first-year BA student of literary studies at the University of Padua,
and this was the first comic book I read as an (almost) adult. A series of unforeseen
events followed that gift. I bought Babel Vol. 1, of course, then the Italian transla-
tion of David B.’s autobiographical graphic novel, Epileptic, and from that moment
on, I knew that comics were extremely serious. I liked the idea of exploring new
types of narration, searching for the relationships between graphic novels and lit-
erature, between images and words, between fiction and reality. A fragmentary
collection started to grow on my shelves, with works by international cartoonists
like Chris Ware, Paul Karasik, David Mazzucchelli, Will Eisner, and Joe Sacco and
Italian authors like GiPi, Manuele Fior, and Gianluca Costantini. My friend Gilda
found an online ad from an Italian website specialising in comics and criticism,
which led to me beginning work as a journalist and reporter for LoSpazioBianco.
it (‘the white space’). I was fascinated by the underground comix scene, where
I eventually met Claudio Calia, a graphic journalist and friend, who coordinated
the Sherwood Comix festival. Thanks to him, I met Guido Ostanel and started to
collaborate with the publishing house BeccoGiallo, often selling their ‘comics of
civil commitment’ at a stand during festivals such as Komikazen, BilBolBul, the
xvi Preface: constellations of urban comics

Treviso Comic Book Festival, and BeComics, before becoming an author myself.
All this happened while I was pursuing a master’s degree in literary theory and
criticism and then a PhD in human geography. With my supervisor, Tania Ros-
setto, constantly pushing me to value my interest in comics even from an academic
point of view, I started to gradually merge my interest in comics with my academic
research and practice. Not by chance, during the first year of my PhD I was also a
student at the Scuola Internazionale di Comics – Academy of Visual Arts and New
Media in Padua. Not by chance, only a couple of months later, in October 2014,
I met Juliet J. Fall and Jason Dittmer in Bologna at a conference on space and gen-
der. What came afterwards can be partially found in the pages of this book. Yet, if
the disciplinary background from which I came is exposed in the chapters, through
theoretical and methodological references, I need to make clear from the beginning
that much of the impetus that led me to write this book comes from the many
people, relations, and dialogues I had over the years outside academic boundaries.
Comics as a Research Practice: Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame is
not a book that contextualises comic book geographies within a broader dialogue
between media and geography. Nor is it a book where you will find a diachronic
perspective on the long-lasting relationship between comics and the city; nor does
it propose a history of the entanglements of geographical thought and comics. You
will not find accurate analysis of how fundamental works in the history of comics
have represented urban space and geographic themes throughout the pages. I am
sure there are more authoritative works that will help you to do this. Comics as a
Research Practice is a book about how to bring comic book geographies into prac-
tice. This book suggests using comics as a research practice to compose counter-
narratives by assembling and disassembling geoGraphic narratives in public space.
The book hopes to let theoretical and methodological reasoning emerge through
‘thought-in-action’ (Thrift 1996) and from empirical examples by proposing crea-
tive interventions to read cities differently and activate processes of narrative place-
making. What you will find, then, is a set of case studies that hope to stimulate
further experimentations with urban comics, together with some initial attempts
to do comics, integrating qualitative, mobile, ethnographic, mapping, and creative
methods of research. You will see, then, interviewees becoming characters, walk-
along interviews turning into plotlines, buildings speaking for themselves through
it-narration, maps unfolding through creative practices, banal places becoming
central narrative chronotopes, and transport means revealing themselves as archives
of memories, practices, affects, and relations. Sometimes, you will find auto- or
ethnofictional vignettes, short excerpts from fieldwork journals, original photo-
graphs, and comics pages. Do not trust them more or even less than you would
trust a well-written theoretical paragraph in the book.
Chapter 1, ‘Introduction: enacting comic book geographies’, provides readers
with a very brief introduction to the cross-disciplinary, processual, and practice-
based approach proposed in the book. Here, readers will find a short introduction
to comics as doings, to what a geocritical approach to comic book geographies
implies, and to the core concept of the ‘geoGraphic narrative’ as a product and
 Preface: constellations of urban comics xvii

practice for creative geographical research. The empirical part of the book that
follows is divided into two parts with two chapters each: Part I, ‘Assembling com-
ics for creative interventions in urban space’, and Part II, ‘Moving comics from
representation to practice’. In Part I, I focus on two urban comics projects that
were realised through geo-artistic and transdisciplinary collaborations. Chapter 2,
‘Comics as assemblages: building urban stories in the public sphere’, presents a site-
specific comics installation realised by Mónica Bellido Mora for the geo-artistic
exhibition Street Geography: Drawing Cities for a Sustainable Future, which took place
in Padua in 2018. The chapter explores the opportunities and limits of research–
art collaborations and presents comics as ‘narrative interferences’ in public space.
With the train station of Padua as a site of artistic intervention, the chapter further
explores assemblage, mobility, it-narration, and the interaction between human,
non-human, and elemental forces in urban contexts through the insertion of photo-
graphs, interviews, and short autofictional paragraphs. Chapter 3, ‘Drawing urban
comics: ethnoGraphic strolling across “peripheral” neighbourhoods’, revolves
around the process of ideation, composition, and dissemination of the comic book
anthology Quartieri: Viaggio al centro delle periferie italiane (Cancellieri and Peterle
2019) that I co-edited with Adriano Cancellieri. First, the chapter focuses on how
scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (sociologists, geographers, anthro-
pologists, urbanists, and others) collaborated with cartoonists to realise five comics
stories about five peripheral neighbourhoods in Italy (Palermo, Rome, Bologna,
Padua, and Milan); second, it retraces the disparate methodologies that Cancellieri
and I embraced during fieldwork in the Arcella neighbourhood in Padua, from go-
along interviews to walking and mapping practices. Finally, it analyses the stylistic
and narrative choices I made for the graphic realisation of the comics story, playing
the role of both geographer and cartoonist. The analysis continues in Part II with
a focus on comics, mobility studies, and the geohumanities. Chapter 4, ‘Graphic
mobilities: mobile practices, bodies, and landscapes of movement in comics’, pro-
poses ‘graphic mobilities’ as a potential field of interest within mobility studies, by
understanding the comics language as an intrinsically ‘mobile grammar’. The chap-
ter analyses some examples of graphic narratives on the move by contemporary
comics authors, from Erin Williams to Jon McNaught, Nick Drnaso, Chris Ware,
and Adrian Tomine, to see how mobile chronotopes, landscapes of movement,
bodies, and everyday mobile practices are both represented and performed in com-
ics. The chapter also illustrates an encounter between graphic mobilities and the
geohumanities and introduces the creative geoGraphic narrative that is at the centre
of the final chapter. Indeed, Chapter 5, ‘Doing comics on the move: an autoeth-
nographic account of geoGraphic fieldwork’, focuses on the short geoGraphic
novel Lines that I realised as a post-doctoral fellow for the international project
PUTSPACE. The chapter moves into exploring the practice of doing comics by
presenting many pages from the original comics story Lines, following the aim of
the project to analyse ‘public transport as public space in European Cities’. Chap-
ter 5 also explores the activities, methods, materials, and practices that were used
to conduct geoGraphic fieldwork; it makes the process of composition explicit,
xviii Preface: constellations of urban comics

showing the geographical reasons for some specific narrative and stylistic choices.
The book, as a whole, is an assemblage of episodes, references, vignettes, facts and
fiction, memories and thoughts:

What emerges is an ethic of theory-as-assemblage, i.e. as a constellation of

singularities that holds together through difference rather than in spite of it,
and that cultivates a provocative and fertile common ground.
(McFarlane and Anderson 2011, p. 164)

References
Cancellieri, C and Peterle, G (eds) 2019, Quartieri viaggio al centro delle periferie italiane, Bec-
coGiallo, Padua.
McFarlane, C and Anderson, J 2011, ‘Thinking with assemblage’, Area, Vol. 43, No. 6,
pp. 162–164.
Thrift, N 1996, Spatial formations, Sage, London.
1
INTRODUCTION
Enacting comic book geographies

Comics as a Research Practice: Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame explores
the doing of comics as a creative, narrative, context-based, and mobile practice
for conducting research in geography and intervening in urban contexts through
art-based interferences in comics form. Starting from an cross-disciplinary perspec-
tive (McCormack 2005, p. 119) and a transdisciplinary research practice, the book
responds to the call for a ‘commitment to resolute experimentalism’ (Dewsbury
et al. 2002, p. 440) in geographical research and proposes comic book geographies
as a prolific laboratory for conducting creative methodological experimentations
in urban spaces. The book speaks especially to those working in the geohumani-
ties and in urban and literary geography, and, more generally, to all those cultural
geographers that are interested in experimenting with creative methods for the
narrativisation of cities, maps, places, and everyday mobile practices. The book is
also meant to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and speak to scholars work-
ing in the interdisciplinary fields of mobility, spatial literary, urban, cultural, and
visual studies. Anthropologists exploring visual methods, sociologists, urbanists
working with narrative approaches to urban contexts, art practitioners interested
in exploring the possibilities and limits of research–art collaborations, and even
comics authors particularly attentive to the representation of space could be equally
engaged by the practice-based approach of the book. Quoting Nigel Thrift, the
book is ‘concerned with thought-in-action, with presentation rather than repre-
sentation’ (Thrift 1996, p. 7) and, thus, also attempts to engage with a less specialist
readership, including students at different levels who would like to start practicing
cross-­disciplinary spatial thinking. For this reason, theoretical and methodological
reasoning in the book is explained through practice-based examples and concrete
case studies that show how to ideate, compose, and disseminate urban comics.
Finally, through the insertion of coloured images, such as photographs taken dur-
ing fieldwork and original comics pages, along with several autoethnographic and
2 Introduction

ethnofictional excerpts, readers have access to the research process from a narrative
and internal perspective and are invited to engage with comics as means to activate
geographical thinking. Readers of this book have an active role to play since they
are asked to take part in the process of meaning-making and of assembling and
disassembling urban narratives.

Comic book geographies in practice

As John D. Dewsbury et al. suggest, ‘enacting geographies’ means to propose a serial
logic of the unfinished that would be able to recognise, undergo, and embrace,
rather than define and explain, the ongoing, exceeding essence of the world and,
therefore, the unfolding essence of research itself. This book starts with the sugges-
tion of accepting that ‘the world is more excessive than we can theorise’ (Dewsbury
et al. 2002, p. 437) and invites geographers to embrace a kind of spatial thinking
that focuses on processually registering experience and presenting research, rather
than on steadily representing fixed thoughts:

We want to work on presenting the world, not on representing it, or explain-

ing it. Our understanding of non-representational theory is that it is charac-
terised by a firm belief in the actuality of representation.
(Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 438)

In this light, representations are no longer interpreted as ‘veils, dreams, ideologies,

as anything, in short, that is a covering which is laid over the ontic’ (p. 438), but
rather as practices that constantly (re)present the world. Following this sugges-
tion, recent research in comic book geography has demonstrated that even comics
can be ‘taken seriously’ (p. 438). This book takes a step forward and suggests that
comics have to be taken seriously not just as objects of analysis but also as creative
practices to conduct geographical research through the use of disparate empirical
engagements with urban comics.
Furthermore, if representations are considered ‘as performative in themselves; as
doings’ (p. 438), the same especially applies to comics. In fact, the peculiar spatial
structure of comics invites authors and readers into a constant spatial effort; pro-
vides them with an experience of performative movements across the space of the
page; and asks them for constant assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of
meanings throughout the narration. As I have highlighted in my previous work on
comic book cartographies,

both the comic author, who composes the comic space by making spatial
decisions, and the reader live a fragmentary cognitive and embodied spatial
experience that is similar to that of searching for the way through composing
and reading a map.
(Peterle 2017, p. 45)
 Introduction 3

Writing and reading comics are intrinsically spatial practices that engage geogra-
phers in immersive experiences and spatial thinking. According to Jason Dittmer’s
seminal manifesto, ‘comic book visualities open geographers up to uncertainty,
tangentiality, and contingency’ (2010a, p. 234), and comics should be explored
from both a representational and non-representational angle. Through ‘emergent
causality’, comics propose a construction of meaning that proceeds through the
montage of apparently disconnected elements and unrelated parts (Dittmer 2010a,
p. 235). Recalling Walter Benjamin’s constellations of meaning, comics do not
compose a single mosaic or vision but rather activate an emergent, unceasing pro-
cess of spatial reconfiguration and composition of meaning. Enacting comic book
geographies means embracing comics as both an object and practice of research,
the double perspective of the author and reader, the geographer and cartoonist, or
researcher–artist. Comics as a research practice invites us to cooperate with a relational,
non-linear, and plurivectorial perception of time and space; a processual under-
standing of representation; and a narrative conception of urban space.
Starting from these ‘tactical suggestions’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 439) and
understanding geographical research as a pluralistic, open-ended process of expe-
riencing and knowing space, in this volume I suggest exploring comic book
geographies from both a representational and more-than-representational view-
point and interpreting comics as an ‘emerging field of practice’ also in geography
(Kuttner et al. 2020, p. 2). Comics offer more than representations of geographi-
cal issues; they are ‘cultural artifacts, sites of literacy, means of communication,
discursive events and practices, sites of imaginative interplay, and tools for literacy
sponsorship’ (Kuttner et al. 2020, pp. 2–3) that permit geographers to conduct
qualitative research differently. Interpreting comics as performative doings permits
me to open up comic book geographies to a double perspective that will emerge
throughout the empirical chapters of the book: comics as doings and the practice of
doing comics. Thinking of comics as doings means recognising that they act, move,
affect, and intervene in the world. Comics create connections and relationships
and activate practices that have effects beyond the comics’ frame, outside the page,
and in the material world. As Ben Anderson claims, there has been a ‘range of
substantive and theoretical research trajectories coalesce[ing] around the proposi-
tion that representations do things – they are activities that enable, sustain, inter-
rupt, consolidate, or otherwise (re)make forms or ways of life’ (2019, p. 1120).
Given cultural geographers’ ‘concerted effort to understand the force of represen-
tations as they make, remake, and unmake worlds’ (Anderson 2019, p. 1120), this
book proposes a specific focus on how the intrinsically spatial grammar of comics
(Groensteen 2007) has the potential to make, remake, and unmake urban contexts.
As Dydia DeLyser et al. say, geographers ‘are working, in multiple ways, with
multiple methods, to find geographical praxis that may speak to a world always in
the making’ (DeLyser et al. 2010, p. 14). I suggest that the doing of comics could be
embraced as a prolific research practice to explore the unfolding process of build-
ing worlds through words and images.
4 Introduction

This ability of comic narratives to act on urban spaces is especially intriguing

in light of the recent (re)appearance of a so-called creative turn in geography and
the declared ‘urgency’ to experiment with creative approaches and methodologies,
especially within the field of the geohumanities (Eshun and Madge 2016; Hawkins
2013b; Jellis 2015). The practice of doing comics thus represents an opportunity to
embrace creativity ‘as a mode of critical exploration’ (Hawkins 2013a, p. 53). Har-
riet Hawkins has defined ‘creative geographies’ as ‘modes of experimental “art-full”
research that have creative practices at their heart’ and ‘have become increasingly
vibrant of late’ (2015, pp. 262). As she further argues:

These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collabo-

ration with artists, creative writers and a range of other arts practitioners,
re-cast geography’s interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities
scholarship and practices and its own intradisciplinary relations.
(2015, pp. 262–263)

Following the increasing interest in art–geography contaminations, this volume

explores comic book geographies from a processual, often autoethnographic per-
spective. In fact, theoretical reasoning emerges here through a series of empirical
examples and creative graphic interventions in urban space that I realised either in
collaboration with artists, art practitioners, and scholars from other disciplines, or
that I drew and wrote myself.
So, why focus on comics in urban contexts? There are several reasons for these
creative comics collaborations to happen in urban contexts. Comics and the city
are inseparably tied and the close connection between graphic narratives and urban
spaces and between the genre of the graphic novel and the metropolis has been
widely recognised and explored across disciplines (Ahrens and Meteling 2010; Eis-
ner 1985, 1996). For the purpose of my book, two very recent works analysing the
relationship between comics and the urban environment were especially helpful:
Benjamin Fraser’s Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form (2019)
and Dominic Davies’ Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary
Graphic Narratives (2019). Both works analyse urban comics as immersed in broader
geographical, spatial, economic, and social contexts. These two works interpret
comics as tools to understand beyond representing cities and more disruptively to
intervene in the shaping of urban spatialities. According to Davies, ‘graphic narra-
tive is able to capture the political forces that solidify into the material infrastructure
of contemporary urban spaces’ (2019, p. 11). In fact, according to both Fraser and
Davies, comics are made of visual and textual elements, of single fragments of space
that somehow re-produce urban infrastructures, making them visible, readable,
understandable, and, thus, malleable. Mirroring the malleability and contingency
of urban space, comics too are openly malleable and contingent in their structure;
as Fraser affirms, ‘in the right hands, the visual structure of the comics page thus
becomes a way of exposing, questioning, critiquing, and perhaps even correcting
this systematic urban imbalance’ (2019, pp. 6–7). Therefore, in thinking of the
 Introduction 5

city as a narrative space, and of the comic page as a spatial architecture, comics lit-
eracy can become an extremely useful tool to continue reimagining the urban and
rethinking cities’ materialities through graphic representations (Amin and Thrift
2002; Latham and McCormack 2004):

In presenting and re-presenting urban space, urban comics use their infra-
structural form to shift the social and spatial coordinates that shape urban life,
a recalibration that can contribute to the rebuilding of a more socially and
spatially just city.
(Davies 2019, p. 17)

Comics can thus be interpreted as partially unpredictable spatial practices and crea-
tive interventions that create spatial transgression through the construction of new
meanings, or the de-construction of old ones. Comics can be used by geographers
as urban interferences that use the same architectural language and spatial gram-
mar of cities; in fact, like cities, the geographies of comics allow for interruptions,
transgressions, changes of trajectories, and plurivectorial movements. This book
aims to contribute to urban comics studies from a precise, practice-based angle that
‘valorises practical expertise’ (Thrift 1996, p. 7) and attempts to show how urban
comics work from within, when spatial choices are made by a comics author who
happens to be also a geographer. Furthermore, rephrasing the title of the chapter by
Paul J. Kuttner, Nick Sousanis, and Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower, ‘How to draw
comics the scholarly way: creating comics-based research in the academy’ (2017),
this book suggests how to draw comics the geographical way and proposes a set of
practices for creating comics-based research in geography.
To this end, before presenting the geoGraphic novel as a creative and narrative
research practice in geography, I would like to refer to the concept of ‘assemblage’
as it has been outlined in recent geographical research with a focus on its relation-
ship with comics and urban thinking. Indeed, assemblage helps to further rein-
force the connections between graphic narratives and urban spaces. Regardless of
how we might interpret and define assemblage ‘as what? a concept, a sensibility,
an orientation?’ (McFarlane 2011, p. 651), it is certainly because of its incessant
mobility, incipient trans-locality, declared pluralism, spatio-temporal relationality,
and professed openness to issues of processuality, practice, and performativity that
a reflection on this concept recurs in this book. Assemblage could be interpreted
as an orientation, a predisposition of thought on the world, and an object of study
in the world, especially when speaking about urbanism and comics. Like comics,
cities themselves appear as spaces in-becoming, constantly being assembled and
reassembled. As Colin McFarlane affirms, ‘assemblage orientates the researcher to
the multiple practices through which urbanism is achieved as a play of the actual
and the possible’ (2011, p. 652). Therefore, a conception of the city-as-assemblage
interprets even the city itself as a processual, relational, generative, and emergent
montage of past, present, and future times and spaces. The city is no more under-
stood as localised and bounded, one and single, but instead ‘as multiple assemblages
6 Introduction

FIGURE 1.1 
TAMassociati assemble the comics page as an architectural building.
TAMassociati, Pantaleo, R, Gerardi, M and Molinari, L 2019, Architettura
della felicità: Futuro come sostanza di cose sperate, BeccoGiallo, Padua, p. 63.
Reproduction by permission of the authors.
 Introduction 7

of actual and virtual urbanisms’ (p. 655). Assemblage is thus a way of understanding,
approaching, dwelling, and even representing urban spaces. If, as Dittmer affirms,
‘the ways in which we narrate the urban are a crucial site of intervention in which
we as geographers can work to enable greater awareness of urban assemblages and
the complex processes that sustain them’ (2014, p. 500), then what if we use the
assemblage of comics as a form to represent and conduct research on urban space?
Narrating urbanism in terms of not just as-assemblage but through-assemblage is
certainly a challenge. As Dittmer further explains, because most urban narratives
adopt the perspective associated with one or a limited number of human protago-
nists and tend to be linear in form, ‘what is needed then are new narratives of
urbanism that express the dynamism of the city, that could be able to act back upon
our own embodied sensibilities, enabling us to see the city anew’ (Dittmer 2014,
p. 478). I hope this book can be interpreted as an experimental attempt to proceed
in this direction.

A geocritical reading of comic book geographies

Through its hybrid visual and textual essence and spatial grammar, the language of
comics inherently asks for a multifocal disciplinary perspective and is a perfect envi-
ronment for cross-disciplinary research practice (Peterle 2017, p. 44). Moving from
visual to urban studies and from the social sciences to the humanities, this book
aims to respond to an imperative already inherent in comics’ multiple modalities,
that is, ‘to think nimbly and creatively across conventional disciplinary boundaries’
(Ball and Kuhlman 2010, p. xxi). In terms of positionality, this attempt comes from
a cultural geographer working within the geohumanities, which is intended as the
‘rapidly growing zone of creative interaction between geography and the humani-
ties’ (Richardson et al. 2011, p. 3), and with the intent of embracing ‘geocreativity’
as an inventive mode for thinking, designing, and practicing geographical research.
Therefore, the different chapters in the book embrace some of the strategies of
geohumanities, such as ‘a proclivity to transgress disciplinary boundaries; to accu-
mulate layer upon layer of transdisciplinary data, and then make connections; to
imagine the world as well as describe it; and to produce scholarship, art, poetry,
community, and politics (often simultaneously)’ through methodologies developed
in disparate disciplinary contexts (Dear 2011a, p. 7). If, as Micheal Dear affirms,
‘the greatest enemy to academic creativity is disciplinary boundaries’, this book is
one of the many voices that react to the ‘call for an interdisciplinarity based in the
ability to speak simultaneously in many intellectual tongues’ through practicing
creative interdisciplinary exchanges (Dear 2011b, pp. 11–12).
Despite a proclivity to think across disciplinary boundaries, my positionality is
inevitably defined by both the disciplinary and geographical context in which I am
working. They influence the way in which I interpret comics and the references
I will use in my reasoning. I am sure that visual anthropologists, sociologists, experts
in media and comics studies, and even geographers working on the geographies
of media and geopolitics would all approach comics from different perspectives
8 Introduction

(Dell’Agnese and Amato 2016; De Spuches 2016; Dittmer 2010b; Dittmer and Bos
2019). Therefore, I will present my geocritical, narrative, and creative approaches in
the following paragraphs, giving readers a kind of roadmap to follow the reasoning
throughout the book. At the same time, I would like to immediately stress that my
geographical positionality plays a significant role in the book. Since I am living and
working as both a geographer and comics author in north-eastern Italy, my empirical
case studies will be mostly situated in the city of Padua in the Veneto region, except
for the one presented in Chapter 5. These geographical coordinates also influenced
the network of collaborations I have built over the years in the Italian comics scene;
the presence of the BeccoGiallo publishing house in Padua and the trust and friend-
ship established with the editorial board and with many of the authors publishing
with them represents a significant starting point for many reasonings and collabora-
tions proposed in the two parts of the book. For this reason, images from works by
some of the comics authors that have deeply influenced my geoGraphic thought –
like Eliana Albertini, Claudio Calia, Gianluca Costantini, and TAMassociati – are
inserted in this chapter, and the reproduction of their comics in these pages represents
their steady presence as points of reference during my research practice and fieldwork
activities. Throughout the book, readers will find works by Italian authors that were
not translated into English together with internationally well-known cartoonists like
Nick Drnaso, Nora Krug, Jon McNaught, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, and Erin
Williams. I believe Sheila Hones’ reflection on the literary geographies of inspira-
tion, creation, and production, but also of promotion and consumption, is extremely
important even for a processual understanding of comic book geographies, as, in
fact, ‘an author producing fiction will in practice usually be drawing on a complex
network of extended sociospatial relations’ (2014, p. 133). The same applies for a
geographer–cartoonist. Recalling Hones’ words, the event of the geoGraphic narra-
tive is always situated, and its intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual geographies,
which means the sociospatialities of its ideation, creation, and reception, are equally
important to consider for comic book geographers (p. 130).
My critical perspective is inspired by seminal works in literary geographies by
Jon Anderson (2014), Marc Brosseau (1994, 1995, 2017), Sheila Hones (2008,
2014), Angahard Saunders (2010), Robert T. Tally Jr. (2011), and Bertrand West-
phal (2007), and by interdisciplinary dialogues happening within the Association of
Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) (Ameel et al. 2015; Finch et al. 2017), in the open-
access e-journal Literary Geographies, which is, according to the journal’s website,
intended as a ‘forum for new research and collaboration in the field of literary/
geographical studies’. Of course, my perspective is also situated within a specific
geographical and disciplinary context. Therefore, theoretical reflections by Italian
scholars working on the relationship between geography and fiction (Lando 1993;
Tanca 2020), on comics and literature from an interdisciplinary spatial perspec-
tive (Guglielmi and Iacoli 2013; Luchetta 2020; Papotti and Tomasi 2014; Ros-
setto 2014), and the conversations that have emerged in two thematic groups of
the Association of Italian Geographers (AGeI), namely devoted to ‘literature and
geography’ and ‘comics and geography’, are of great importance for the content
of this book. Yet, the aim of this volume is not to provide you with an exhaustive
 Introduction 9

theoretical framework on literary or comic book geographies; my scope is rather to

move comic book geographies from representation to practice, from the perspec-
tive of critical readers to that of the author.
Thus, from a disciplinary perspective, the idea of the ‘geoGraphic novel’ as both
a product and practice of research comes from the reforged connections between
geography and literature (Saunders 2010) and from broader reasoning on what I call
‘narrative geographies’. My focus on narrative geographies starts from the interdis-
ciplinary field of literary geographies and from a ‘geocritical’ and ‘carto-centred’
(Peterle 2019; Rossetto 2014) approach to not only texts but also disparate forms,
genres, and practices of space-centred narration. Thus, a ‘narrative geographical’
approach analyses the entanglements between real and fictional, textual and mate-
rial spaces; it explores the prolific exchange between the narrative representations
of space, place, maps, and mobilities, and the spatial practices that are activated
by them; it experiments with narrative forms and textual and visual storytelling
practices as creative ways to deconstruct dominant discourses about cities, places,
and spatial identities and to activate the plurivocal composition of spatial-meanings.
Moreover, a ‘narrative geographical’ approach rejects an instrumental use of litera-
ture, texts, and narrative or artistic representations and tries to consider both the
contents and peculiar forms of different languages, types, and genres of narration
to see how they shape unpredicted geographical visions. Narrative geographies are
explored through a processual and relational approach (Saunders and Anderson
2016) that reads narrative representations as emergent spatial practices that are situ-
ated in space and time and performed in different contexts (Thrift 1996, p. 3). In
this context, the role of authors and readers is equally important, as are their differ-
ent engagements and positionalities; thus, ‘narrative geographies’ explore represen-
tations as processes, from the moment of ideation to the moment of composition
and circulation. A narrative geographical approach is thus a critical interdisciplinary
perspective for analysing narratives from a space-centred point of view; it is also a
creative mode of thinking and practicing cross-disciplinary research, interpreting
spaces as archives of stories, and using stories as tools to actualise different spatial
meanings and activate new trajectories for spatial action.

Comic book geographies in practice: sketching

the geoGraphic novel
In this book, I would like to propose a practice-based approach to comic-book
geographies that realises geoGraphic narratives as part of geographers’ research
efforts. Throughout the book I refer to comics and graphic narratives, consider-
ing different formats and genres that use the combination of words and images
in sequence to compose stories. Thus, by geoGraphic narratives, I mean comics
stories that have been written and drawn through aware space-centred and geo-
graphical decisions, and whose stylistic choices have adopted a precise geocritical
perspective. GeoGraphic narratives can take different digital or printed forms, from
comic books to web-comics, and can be displayed as place-based, site-specific artis-
tic installations in different spatial contexts. They can be realised by the geographer
10 Introduction

FIGURE 1.2 International geopolitics, conflicts, struggles for civil rights in the works of
graphic journalism by the Italian artist–activist Gianluca Costantini. Cos-
tantini, G 2017, Fedeli alla linea: Il mondo raccontato dal graphic journalism,
BeccoGiallo, Padua, p. 240 and p. 246.

alone or in collaboration with other scholars and artists; they can be funded and
sustained by academic projects, directed by publishing houses, or appear as ‘do it
yourself ’ publications circulated in the networks of underground ‘comix’. Finally,
in terms of length and genres, geoGraphic narratives can be comic strips, short
comics stories, or geoGraphic novels. In Chapter 2, I present a comics story that
was designed and installed as a site-specific art-installation in the city of Padua; in
Chapter 3, I focus on a comic book anthology that I co-edited with urban soci-
ologist Adriano Cancellieri; in Chapter 4, I focus on graphic mobilities through
the geocentred reading of disparate graphic novels and memoirs by contemporary
comics authors; and finally, in Chapter 5, I present an original geoGraphic novel
I have written and drawn as a geographer–cartoonist, retracing the different phases
of my geoGraphic fieldwork practice in Turku, Finland.
Before exploring geoGraphic narratives, let me briefly explain what it means to
embrace a geocritical perspective on comic book geographies. Recently, geogra-
phers have been showing a growing interest in the ‘force of representations’ (Ander-
son 2019), and as a result, we are witnessing a renewed interest in literary geographies
and a growth of research in the subfield of comic book geographies. Therefore, the
definition of comics as a ‘spatial language’, which was pioneered by Thierry Groen-
steen (2007), is a crucial starting point for a geocentred analysis of comics. ‘By
adopting a geocentred reading, I further aim to stress (similar to Brosseau’s approach
Another random document with
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Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.
[171]
And we begin to understand that in wars and political
catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is
not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.
 X
Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in
understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal
effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at
last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to
which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-
picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form
of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was
meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s
environment by the way of reason. But while the word “necessary”
was accepted readily enough, it has been overlooked that this
limitation of the principle to a single domain of knowledge is just what
forbids its application to the contemplation and experiencing of living
history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely
incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth
Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature
and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to
think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think.
In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of
cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible
face of becoming with the construction-lines of a physical nature-
picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and
causally-thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental
absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic
becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of
the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age,
nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a
cause, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a
past. The one recognizes the case, that which is generally possible
and has a fixed inner form which is the same whenever and
wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the
event which once was and will never recur. And, according as we
grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or
physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from
technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless
cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day
and to-morrow.
But the spirit of our great cities refuses to be involuntary.
Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in
surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to
conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.”
“Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the
great word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist
conception of history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the
setting up of usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,”
“world-peace,” as aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march
of progress.” But in these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny
has died, and with it the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful
and big with a future, presses on to meet a dark decision.
For only youth has a future, and is Future, that enigmatic synonym
of directional Time and of Destiny. Destiny is always young. He who
replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the
not-yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—direction is
wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant
flow of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he
feels that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was
the faith in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great
doers of another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful
melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young
clan, people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for
men of act and of vision, who are young however white their hair,
younger even than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless
utilitarianism. The feeling of a significance in the momentarily
present world-around discloses itself in the earliest days of
childhood, when it is still only the persons and things of the nearest
environment that essentially exist, and develops through silent and
unconscious experience into a comprehensive picture. This picture
constitutes the general expression of the whole Culture as it is at the
particular stage, and it is only the fine judge of life and the deep
searcher of history who can interpret it.
 At this point a distinction presents itself between the immediate
impression of the present and the image of the past that is only
presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as
happening and the world as history. The eye of the man of action
(statesman and general) appreciates the first, that of the man of
contemplation (historian and poet) the second. Into the first one
plunges practically to do or to suffer; chronology,[172] that great
symbol of irrevocable past, claims the second. We look backwards,
and we live forward towards the unforeseen, but even in childhood
our technical experience soon introduces into the image of the
singular occurrence elements of the foreseeable, that is, an image of
regulated Nature which is subject not to physiognomic fact but to
calculation. We apprehend a “head of game” as a living entity and
immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of lightning as a peril
and then as an electrical discharge. And this second, later, petrifying
projection of the world more and more tends to overpower the first in
the Megalopolis; the image of the past is mechanized and
materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules for present
and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a rational
understanding of them.
Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal
knowledge and technical experience refer only to the become, the
extended, the comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge
(Wissen) to Nature, viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an
element, treated as in space and subjected to the law of cause and
effect. Is there, then, a science of History at all? To answer this
question, let us remember that in every personal world-picture, which
only approximates more or less to the ideal picture, there is both
something of Nature and something of History. No Nature is without
living, and no History without causal, harmonies. For within the
sphere of Nature, although two like experiments, conformably to law,
have the like result, yet each of these experiments is a historical
event possessing a date and not recurring. And within that of History,
the dates or data of the past (chronologies, statistics, names,
forms[173]) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even if we are unaware
of them, and all else is image, Theoria, both in the one domain and
in the other. But history is itself the condition of being “in the focus”
and the material is only an aid to this condition, whereas in Nature
the real aim is the winning of the material, and theory is only the
servant of this purpose.
There is, therefore, not a science of history but an ancillary
science for history, which ascertains that which has been. For the
historical outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific
research, on the contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its
technical origin and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the
causal sort and nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its
glance upon something else it becomes Metaphysics, something
trans-scientific. And just because this is so, historical and natural-
science data are different. The latter consistently repeat themselves,
the former never. The latter are truths, the former facts. However
closely related incidentals and causals may appear to be in the
everyday picture, fundamentally they belong to different worlds. As it
is beyond question that the shallowness of a man’s history-picture
(the man himself, therefore) is in proportion to the dominance in it of
frank incidentals, so it is beyond question that the emptiness of
written history is in proportion to the degree in which it makes the
establishment of purely factual relations its object. The more deeply
a man lives History, the more rarely will he receive “causal”
impressions and the more surely will he be sensible of their utter
insignificance. If the reader examines Goethe’s writings in natural
science, he will be astounded to find how “living nature” can be set
forth without formulas, without laws, almost without a trace of the
causal. For him, Time is not a distance but a feeling. But the
experience of last and deepest things is practically denied to the
ordinary savant who dissects and arranges purely critically and
allows himself neither to contemplate nor to feel. In the case of
History, on the contrary, this power of experience is the requisite.
And thus is justified the paradox that the less a historical researcher
has to do with real science, the better it is for his history.
To elucidate once more by a diagram:
Soul ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯➛ World

Life, Direction Extension

 Destiny-Experience
The uniquely
occurring and irrevocable
“Fact”
Physiognomic tact (instinct)
↓ ↓
Consciousness
as servant of Being
The world-image of “History” The world-image of "Nature"
Life-experience
Image of the Past
Constructive Contemplation
(Historian, Tragic Dramatist)
to investigate Destiny
Direction into the Future
Constructive Action
(Statesman)
to be Destiny
Causal Knowledge
The
constantly-possible
“Truth”
Systematic criticism
(reason)
Consciousness
as master of Being
Scientific methods
Religion. Natural Science
Theoretical: Myth and
Dogma. Hypothesis
Practical: Cult. Technique

XI

Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious,

physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,”
the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date
sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our
comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in
reality, with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an
underlying rational purpose—without which indeed his world would
be meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most
unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his choice of his
fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as
prima causa—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their
works with pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on
natural-science lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression
of this method in one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which
the “Weltgetriebe” is stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the
Nineteenth Century, progressing from Rationalism to Materialism,
has made this opinion canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on
high. To it Darwin, in the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s
Nature-theory. The organic logic of the facts of life was supplanted
by a mechanics in physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural
selection, are utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The
historical dispensations were superseded by a naturalistic movement
“in space.” (But are there historical or spiritual “processes,” or
life-“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements”
such as, for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment
anything whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The
word “process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of
becoming, and lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact
mathematical structure of world-happening. And thereupon the
“exact” historian enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture
we had before us a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which
were amenable to rational analysis like a physical experiment or a
chemical reaction, and that therefore causes, means, methods and
objects were capable of being grouped together as a
comprehensible system on the visible surface. It all becomes
astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a
sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his
personality and its world-picture) comes off.
Hunger and Love[174] thus become mechanical causes of
mechanical processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and
sexual problems (both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of
public—all-too-public—existence) become the obvious themes of
utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding tragedy. For the
social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of
history, and that which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was
destiny in the highest sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the
Sea” nothing but a sexual problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of
our great cities build—build from their very first causes to their very
last effect—but they do not sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to
overcome this merely prosaic element in his more critical than
intuitive temperament, to be a poet quand même, hence his
desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to motive his events. In
Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to shape tragedy
causally, and he dissected and re-dissected and transformed and
retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a system that
proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—
Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-
secret in the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But
Goethe’s warning: “Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind
phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson (sie selbst sind
die Lehre)” had become incomprehensible to the century of Marx
and Darwin. The idea of trying to read a destiny in the physiognomy
of the past and that of trying to represent unadulterated Destiny as a
tragedy were equally remote from them. In both domains, the cult of
the useful had set before itself an entirely different aim. Shapes were
called into being, not to be, but to prove something. “Questions” of
the day were “treated,” social problems suitably “solved,” and the
stage, like the history-book, became a means to that end.
Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has made
biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic stirrings
happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of the
rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped
through.
With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our
ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the
lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method,
the superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is
neither the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the
scepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.[175]
For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and
fields of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the
naïve faith of the layman and the Monist in these things. They are
images which he subjects to the abstract relationships of his
differential equations, in which he clothes trans-phenomenal
numbers, and if he allows himself a certain freedom to choose
amongst several theories, it is because he does not try to find in
them any actuality but that of the “conventional sign.”[176] He knows,
too, that over and above an experimental acquaintance with the
technical structure of the world-around, all that it is possible to
achieve by this process (which is the only one open to natural
science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly not
“Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of
Nature being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the
domain of the extended, to know Nature means to know oneself.
If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose
business is to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of
content and of methods the weakest. What historical investigation
really is, namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than
by the course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon
mineralogy, and at once his views fit themselves together into a
conspectus of an earth-history in which his beloved granite signifies
nearly the same as that which I call the proto-human signifies in
man’s history. He investigates well-known plants, and the prime
phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original form of the history of all
plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding further, he reaches those
extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and spiral tendencies in
vegetation which have not been fully grasped even yet. His studies
of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of life, lead him to
the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to the view that
the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of six vertebræ.
Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity of Destiny
just as he himself expressed it in his Orphische Urworte:

“So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.

So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.
Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape
Impressed, that living must itself unfold.”

The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical

observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great
historian of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic
and were concerned with experiential learning of the become, the
dead, and the rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—
a case in which, it must be added, both sides were in the right, for
the one had “knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead
colour[177] while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-
sensuous “feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition;
and now therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated
with all strictness.
History carries the mark of the singular-factual, Nature that of the
continuously possible. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-
around in order to see by what laws it must actualize itself,
irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen—
irrespective, that is, of time—then I am working in a genuine science.
For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is
utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or
never. That is, it is independent of Destiny. There are thousands of
chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced,
but they are demonstrably possible and therefore they exist—for the
fixed System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the
whirling universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on
facts. Facts follow one another, truths follow from one another, and
this is the difference between “when” and “how.” That there has been
a flash of lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by
the pointing of a finger. “When there is lightning there is thunder,” on
the contrary, is something that must be communicated by a
proposition or sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless,
while systematic knowing can only be through words. “Only that
which has no history is capable of being defined,” says Nietzsche
somewhere. But History is present becoming that tends into the
future and looks back on the past. Nature stands beyond all time, its
mark is extension, and it is without directional quality. Hence, for the
one, the necessity of the mathematical, and for the other the
necessity of the tragic.
In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny
and that of acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a
Brabant tapestry warp and woof together effect the picture. Every
law must, to be available to the understanding at all, once have been
discovered through some destiny-disposition in the history of an
intellect—that is, it must have once been in experiential life; and
every destiny appears in some sensible garb—as persons, acts,
scenes and gestures—in which Nature-laws are operative. Primitive
life is submissive before the daemonic unity of the fateful; in the
consciousness of the mature Culture this “early” world-image is
incessantly in conflict with the other, “late,” world-image; and in the
civilized man the tragic world-feeling succumbs to the mechanizing
intellect. History and nature within ourselves stand opposed to one
another as life is to death, as ever-becoming time to ever-become
space. In the waking consciousness, becoming and become struggle
for control of the world-picture, and the highest and maturest forms
of both sorts (possible only for the great Cultures) are seen, in the
case of the Classical soul, in the opposition of Plato and Aristotle,
and, in the case of our Western, in that of Goethe and Kant—the
pure physiognomy of the world contemplated by the soul of an
eternal child, and its pure system comprehended by the reason of an
eternal greybeard.

XII

Herein, then, I see the last great task of Western philosophy, the
only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the
Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of
spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to choose the path and
conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can
foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.
Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto
unimagined mode of superlative historical research that is truly
Western, necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul
but ours—a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a
morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the
highest and last ideas; a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not
only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have
contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of
actuality as grand Cultures. This philosophic view—to which we and
we alone are entitled in virtue of our analytical mathematic, our
contrapuntal music and our perspective painting—in that its scope
far transcends the scheme of the systematist, presupposes the eye
of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and
apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious
relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt. To bring up, out of
the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic culture-history
as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost
spirituality—such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments
of a Rembrandt portrait or a Cæsar-bust, so the new art will
contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of
a Culture as a superlative human individuality.
To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a
conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul—
Classical, Egyptian or Arabian—so intimately as to absorb into one’s
self, to make part of one’s own life, the totality expressed by typical
men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by
thought and customs, is quite a new manner of experiencing life.
Every epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, the tongues,
the nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and will
become existent, are physiognomic traits of high symbolic
significance that it will be the business of quite a new kind of “judge
of men” (Menschenkenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and
Cybele, festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and
gladiatorial games, dervishes and Darwinians, railways and Roman
roads, “Progress” and Nirvana, newspapers, mass-slavery, money,
machinery—all these are equally signs and symbols in the world-
picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would interpret.
"Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis." Solutions and panoramas
as yet unimagined await the unveiling. Light will be thrown on the
dark questions which underlie dread and longing—those deepest of
primitive human feelings—and which the will-to-know has clothed in
the “problems” of time, necessity, space, love, death, and first
causes. There is a wondrous music of the spheres which wills to be
heard and which a few of our deepest spirits will hear. The
physiognomic of world-happening will become the last Faustian
philosophy.
 CHAPTER V

MAKROKOSMOS
I

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE

SPACE-PROBLEM
 CHAPTER V

MAKROKOSMOS
 I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND
THE SPACE-PROBLEM
I

The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself

therefore into the wider idea of an all-embracing symbolism.
Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply
to investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its
inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to
which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive
the new orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a
fragment and a foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it,
we have a Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is
limited to its own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor
technical “motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the
respective bases of the lived and the known) exhausts the living
itself. We both live and know when we are awake, but, in addition,
we live when mind and senses are asleep. Though night may close
every eye, the blood does not sleep. We are moving in the moving
(so at least we try to indicate, by a word borrowed from science, the
inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel with inward certainty). But it
is only in the waking existence that “here” and “there” appear as an
irreducible duality. Every impulse proper to oneself has an
expression and every impulse alien to oneself makes an impression.
And thus everything of which we are conscious, whatever the form in
which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life and actuality, or
History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or God, past and
future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning still, a
final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this
incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics
which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a
symbol.
Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all,
unsought impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of
actuality that for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and
inwardly-sure significance, and that is incommunicable by process of
reason. The detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque
ornament; the forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of
costume and rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole
classes of peoples and men; the communication-and community-
forms of man and beast; and beyond all this the whole voiceless
language of Nature with her woods and pastures, flocks, clouds,
stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom and decay, nearness and
distance—all this is the emblematical impression of the Cosmos
upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours quite
capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense of a
homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the
tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and
assembles it as such.
Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but
with what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up,
at once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We
live the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as
something alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of
actuality; and in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp
causally as things and properties, and impulses in which we feel
beings, numina (“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in
it, further, something which, as it were, eliminates the duality.
Actuality—the world in relation to a soul—is for every individual the
projection of the Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the
Proper mirroring itself on the Alien; one’s actuality then signifies
oneself. By an act that is both creative and unconscious—for it is not
“I” who actualize the possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—
the bridge of symbol is thrown between the living “here” and “there.”
Suddenly, necessarily, and completely “the” world comes into being
out of the totality of received and remembered elements: and as it is
an individual who apprehends the world, there is for each individual
a singular world.
There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings
and like-living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single,
independent and external world that each believes to be common to
all is really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring
experience in the existence of each.
A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root-
beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no clear
world for a soul or self-conscious soul within a world, to the highly
intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened
civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an
expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive
meaning of all things to one in which separate and specific signs are
distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the
dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark
significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of
extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer
even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than
is generally supposed)—it is continuously and always, for as long as
my life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am
endowing that which is outside me with the whole content that is in
me, from the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid
world of causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And
even in the domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for
we find that refined thought puts inexpressible meanings into signs
like the triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.
This is the idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all
symbols in relation to one soul. From this property of being
significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the
corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and
classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to
possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid
forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks
out of the essence of one and only one soul.
At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and
experienced by men of one Culture or spiritual community are
interrelated, and on the greater or less degree of this interrelation
depends the greater or less communicability of intuitions, sensations
and thoughts from one to another—that is, the possibility of making
intelligible what one has created in the style of one’s own being,
through expression-media such as language or art or religion, by
means of word-sounds or formulæ or signs that are themselves also
symbols. The degree of interrelation between one’s world and
another’s fixes the limit at which understanding becomes self-
deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we can
understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the
men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it.
The Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the
essence of alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they
were wont to rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien
peoples. But in our own case too, the current translations of the
ἀρχή, or Atman, or Tao of alien philosophers presuppose our proper
world-feeling, which is that from which our “equivalents” claim their
significance, as the basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly
we elucidate the characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits
with reference to our own life-experience. In both cases we deceive
ourselves. That the artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living
for us—“immortal” as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by
the unanimity with which we understand the alien work in the proper
sense. Of this tendency of ours the effect of the Laocoön group on
Renaissance sculpture and that of Seneca on the Classicist drama
of the French are examples.

II

Symbols, as being things actualized, belong to the domain of the

extended. They are become and not becoming (although they may
stand for a becoming) and they are therefore rigidly limited and
subject to the laws of space. There are only sensible-spatial
symbols. The very word “form” designates something extended in
the extended,—even the inner forms of music are no exception, as
we shall see. But extension is the hall-mark of the fact “waking
consciousness,” and this constitutes only one side of the individual
existence and is intimately bound up with that existence’s destinies.
Consequently, every trait of the actual waking-consciousness,
whether it be feeling or understanding, is in the moment of our
becoming aware of it, already past. We can only reflect upon
impressions, “think them over” as our happy phrase goes, but that
which for the sensuous life of the animals is past, is for the
grammatical (wortgebundene) understanding of man passing,
transient. That which happens is, of course, transient, for a
happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance is also
transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian
tomb-temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the
traveller, through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together
by the body of the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where
they support the interior, to the façades of the Renaissance in which
they provide the upward-striving element. As we see, an old
significance never returns; that which has entered the domain of
extension has begun and ended at once. A deep relation, and one
which is early felt, exists between space and death. Man is the only
being that knows death; all others become old, but with a
consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to
them eternal. They live, but like children in those first years in which
Christianity regards them as still “innocent,” they know nothing of life,
and they die and they see death without knowing anything about it.
Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose understanding has
been emancipated by the habit of language from dependence on
sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the notion of
transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential
conviction of irrevocability. We are Time,[178] but we possess also an
image of history and in this image death, and with death birth,
appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life pursues its course
without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowledge of
task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep
and significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the
inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The
child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something
that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same
moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien extended
world. “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the
new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance,” said
Tolstoi once. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when man
first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the
universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as the
essentially human fear in the presence of death, the limit of the light-
world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher thought originates as
meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation,
every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches
its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the
dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style
begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the Classical with the
geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the Arabian with
catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral wherein
the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of
the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical
sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the
life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins
new life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that
makes worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith
immortality. Till we have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life
that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past. The
beast has only the future, but man knows also the past. And thus
every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world,
that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable
world. It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread
over Western Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of
this religion was born.
Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with
all the forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of
the extended with the inexorable and always present limits of its
causality, this world filled with dark almightiness that continuously
threatened to make an end of him. This energetic defensive lies
deep in unconscious existence, but, as being the first impulse that
genuinely projects soul and world as parted and opposed, it marks
the threshold of personal conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-
feeling begin to work, and all culture, inner or outer, bearing or