A Solar Anus - Extra Extra Magazine

UGLINESS

He is thirty-six years old, not tall but not a short man either. A single defining feature would be hard to name; perhaps it’s more a constellation of his moustache, his thin rounded spectacles and the shock of hair that stands up as if fizzling with a sort of static charge. His weak shoulders curve over a rotund trunk around which his trousers are hiked up. After some anxiety and deliberation, the man gingerly locks the door of his room. Considering the risks, he has come to the conclusion that for his first time he is better off in the safety of his own hotel room, alone, the bed within easy reach. Approaching this as a sort of experiment, with an almost scientific flair for detail, he has done his research and is anticipating a number of different outcomes. He is alone in his room, but also alone, unknown, in this metropolis. This isolation satisfies him; what he is about to do is something that can only be experienced alone. His room looks out onto the streets of Marseille. In the belly of this city he suddenly sees the streets as knives that criss-cross the skin. It is the 29th July, 1928. The clock turns seven in the evening. The midday heat has subsided and the sun won’t set for another couple of hours. Finally, after much trepidation, he takes the hashish.
Walter Benjamin was not much older than me when he recounted the experience of taking hashish in Marseille. His account of the city is done through the space- and time-altering power of this drug. It is almost as if, as he emerges from his hotel room to take his high into a more intense sensorial environment, he creates Marseille as he is seeing it. After his first port of call at a café in Belsunce, he wanders down the Cannebière to the Vieux Port to find dinner, a feast that he imagines could continue into an eternity. In a twist that I have come to learn is truly indicative of Marseille, being ready for his eternal meal, Benjamin is informed that, with regret, the kitchen is now closed. Marseille is a transformative playground, a place that unfolds under his feet as he walks. In this haze, the car horns form a brass band that plays a haphazard public concert in the streets. And it occurs to him with such profound simplicity – hadn’t it occurred to anyone else before? – that ‘ugliness could appear as the true reservoir of beauty’.

In the 1920s, Benjamin spent a lot of time in cities such as Moscow, Naples and Marseille – each in its different way giving him a cure to the disease of modern life in general, and the one in which he had been raised in particular... The cities that turned Walter Benjamin on were the opposite of that: porous labyrinths annulling class, time, space and even distinctions of light and dark. Courtesy: Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

Rue Beauvau, the hotel of Walter Benjamin during the summer of 1940

A ‘truly exceptional book about hashish’, as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of ‘protocols of drug experiments’, written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime.Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called ‘profane illumination’. At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin’s work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls ‘image space’ comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.

FETED BREATH

Before finding myself in Marseille, I was overwhelmed by the responses to the news of my relocation there. To most it was greeted with a kind of jealous nonchalance and comments about the sunshine, while for those unacquainted with Marseille’s reputation it was somehow synonymous with the coastline it tenuously shares with Cassis, Cannes, Nice and Monaco. Only when I told the news to French friends were there a mixture of responses, from bafflement to bids of good luck. It is fair to say that in the French imaginary, Marseille is a dangerous wild outcrop, a hotspot of criminality, an open sore on the otherwise azure face of the French-Mediterranean coast. The city has attracted a considerable number of travelogues – and has its place within literature. It is for this reason that Marseille is perhaps best understood as a metaphor. It lends itself to interpretation for the passing traveller.
The descriptions I have found often take on a corporeal quality; there is something internal and bodily about it. Marseille is a city on a human scale, bustling with life and then equally deserted depending on its seasons. It ebbs and flows like a living organism. I believe that any description of Marseille would surely have to take into account its symbolic power. And it is in this relentless idea of Marseille as a body that we can also understand its eroticism, its vulgarity and its vivid visceral qualities.
When recovered from his experimentation with hashish, Benjamin described the city as ‘a yellow-studded maw of a seal with salt water running out between the teeth’, one that ‘exhales a stink of oil, urine, and printer’s ink’. Its population? ‘A product of decomposition with a resemblance to human beings.’ Benjamin’s articles are a testament to Marseille as a city where probably everyone is a kind of visitor – where the perspective of the outsider becomes the most relevant one. And maybe it really is a city of outsiders. Although the Marseille of today is an altogether different place than it was for Benjamin in the late 1920s, I’m sure that such images were indelibly burned into the contemporary imagination with all the ferocity of Marseille’s own blinding sunlight.

The political thriller Marseille, a French Netflix production, had its global premiere in 2016. The story is straight political soap. Robert Taro (Gérard Depardieu), mayor of Marseille for twenty years, is ready to pass on power to his slick protégé, Lucas Barrès (Benoît Magimel). But Taro’s apprentice turns on him, colluding with the mob to scotch plans for Taro’s crowning achievement, a casino in the city’s Vieux Port. Taro re-enters the election. The battle enfolds his long-suffering wife, Rachel (Géraldine Pailhas), and his journalist daughter (Stéphane Caillard) and reveals Barrès as a lizardy, omnisexual manipulator. Deals are struck, backs stabbed and pants dropped, much like those you’ve seen on a dozen angst-by-the-numbers American series, but with more cigarette smoking. One sequence, in particular, symbolizes the rather easy use of Marseille to sex and vulgarity to impress the viewer: the one where the character of Lucas Barrès, interpreted by Benoit Magimel, loosened ‘the accent’ already cult ‘you Do not find it strange that we touch the zob talking about Picasso, eh?.’

SOLAR ANNULUS

When Charles Dickens visited Marseille in 1844 his impression was one of light. Moreover, it was of the way the light in Marseille pierces any keyhole or chink in a shutter like a white-hot arrow. For Dickens, Marseille became the setting for the jail in the opening scene of Little Dorrit. He uses the luminescence of the sun and its fierceness to counter the darkness of his jail, as if the whole of the city is there only to cast a shadow.It was the stark shadows bordering the fiery rivers of brightness in the streets that inclined Dickens to imagine Marseille as a city only of light and darkness: a city in harsh contrast. Every metropolis has its dangerous areas, places one should not go but simultaneously must because they call to us and we succumb. Each neighbourhood has its dark and dirty alleyways, reeking of piss and slowly filling with rubbish. It is important to note that these ‘places’, which to us often feel very real and territorial, are in fact a dense and complex interweaving of affect, fictions, politics and hearsay. Although they seem like locations to avoid or be ashamed of, they must exist. So we must imagine those places even if only to reassure ourselves that we are somehow separate from them. While these places are with us, they are of us and within us.
Marseille is undoubtedly a city of the sun – but the day is only ever equal to the night. It is in its darkness that it is at its most characteristic. Marseille’s position affords it a generous microclimate; day after day of permanently clear skies and burning sun can be experienced year round. Walking the streets of Marseille as Dickens did, one sees the windows of the buildings all shuttered as if the town is shielding its eyes. In the summer, the heat slows the city down and people dart from shadow to shadow or cool themselves in the sea. Although he undoubtedly stood out in such a place, Dickens understood the light, not in terms of its blinding quality, but as an intense and confrontational form of staring.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.
It is notable that in its darkness, in Marseille’s balmy nights, there is usually more than vines that wink at passers-by.

THE SHIPS THAT NEVER SAILED

Marseille’s story is as old as humanity; it crawls outwards from an ancient natural harbour that the Vieux Port sits within. I never had a direct intention to move to Marseille; I moved for love. Nor did I plan on staying and, like many others, I am haunted by the feeling of passing through, of sitting on something’s tail, of finding myself here looking for something else. I am both here but elsewhere, a feeling that is common in port cities. It is here, in the Vieux Port, amongst the thousands of masts and ropes, the clinking sound of the wind passing through this veritable forest, that one truly feels at the cusp of some place elsewhere.
There is an attempt now to recreate Marseille as a destination, as somewhere one could arrive. But it has, since the Second World War, been marked as a place of departure – a last resort and a method of escape. It was at this time that Arthur Koestler vividly pictures Marseille as the ‘last open port, Europe’s gaping mouth, vomiting the contents of her poisoned stomach’. It’s notable that during that period, swamped with refugees, the visa system was Kafkaesque. One needed a paper to declare one’s intentions to leave the city in order to stay temporarily and then to be able to apply for a visa elsewhere. The system was slow and in many cases impossibly convoluted or politically frustrated. At some point a significant population were residing purely on the declaration that they wouldn’t stay, living with the promise of boarding ships that would never sail, with visas that would never be granted. In Marseille perhaps one moves through, or is in a constant state of motion and never settled in conventional terms. Even if one is static, the surroundings are in motion. History marks a city; it cuts it deep. Streets like knife cuts.

Varian Fry, right, who helped provide safe passage from Vichy France to many intellectual and cultural figures, at the American Rescue Center in Marseille with, from left, the Surrealist leader André Breton; his wife, Jacqueline Lamba Breton; and the artist Max Ernst, who married the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim. © Ylla/Pryor Dodge, via The Jewish Museum, New York Courtesy: The New York Times

PALATIAL PLUMBING

At the same time that Benjamin sat alone in his hotel room, Bataille was elsewhere writing his surrealist text whose title has been appropriated for the purposes of my new interpretation of Marseille. In The Solar Anus Bataille expands on the cyclical nature of life, the connection between life and waste, death and rebirth. It is not about Marseille, but what an image, how grotesque!
As Marseille is best understood as a metaphor I will propose a new one, one that I have not yet found in my reading, which is imagining Marseille as an anus – one that is as undoubtedly as blinding as the anus belonging to the eighteen-year-old girl who originally dazzled Georges Bataille, inspiring him to write his text in the first place. It is in this image that we can locate Marseille within the body of metropolitan France.
It is a place not so much forgotten; it has been forever present and, at some moments in history, even celebrated and lavished with decadent buildings and riches from the colonies. But it is now sidelined, never receiving much attention. In much the same way as we would be ashamed to show our own ass, it will be hard work to get to a place collectively where Marseille becomes a showcase city. Marseille uniquely occupies a psycho-geographical position firmly on France’s backside and thus cannot be separated from narratives of sanitation, of water and soap. Le Savon de Marseille – the city’s most ubiquitous tourist export – is a case in point.
In addition, the most stunning monument to this connection is the Palais Longchamp – a nineteenth-century architectural folly, a water palace that encompasses the Art Museum and the Natural History Museum within its sweeping wingspan. In the centre is an enormous cascade featuring enormous bulls, beautiful synthetic grottos and an abundance of carvings of grapes, wheat, fish and other products of the region. It is built at the end of the Canal de Marseille, an incredibly ambitious and extensive canal project that was necessary to bring clean water to the city. Its arrival in Marseille would see an end to the relentless plagues and cholera outbreaks that were caused by the city’s reliance on the, at times rather pathetic, Huveaune River, which had already become an open sewer by the fifteenth century.

Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acéphale. He has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought, influencing such writers as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the fascinating The Accursed Share, are modern classics.

The artist Hans Bellmer met Bataille in 1945 through the publisher Alain Gheerbrant, who asked Bellmer to illustrate a new edition of L’histoire de l’oeil. Bataille’s influence on Bellmer is seen in the drawings, etchings, and photographs emerging from these studies, as well as in those Bellmer would later create for Madame Edwarda. ‘I agree with Georges Bataille,’ Bellmer later explains, ‘that eroticism relates to a knowledge of evil and the inevitability of death[;] it is not simply an expression of joyful passion’ (qtd. in Webb 369). But the vision is clearly reciprocal: Bataille’s conception of Eros, of a sexuality that is always already tainted by sin and the consciousness of death and that is only possible accompanying the death or absence of God, finds few better visual correlates than in Bellmer. © Study for Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’œil [The Story of the Eye] 1946

GLORIOUSLY PERFUMED

Like in most cities today, Marseille’s waterworks and rivers are mostly hidden and, apart from the odd aqueduct, they flow beneath and through the city. Although in literary terms the port of Marseille has more often been referred to as a mouth (albeit a feted and rotting one), there is perhaps no better metaphor for the Palais Longchamp as a glorified and celebrated anus. It is the grand exit of the canalised water through the city and finally into the sea, the required additional flush of water to render Marseille inhabitable. As such, the irony of its famous soap industry cannot be lost on any visitor. However cleaned up, Marseille is a dirty city; after sundown it is a city of rats.
In its famous ‘Marché des Capucins’ in Noailles, despite daily cleaning and high-pressure sprays, there is a mysterious layer of filth on the pavements that remains with as much persistence and unconstraint as the rats that trot atop it in trepidation before scurrying into holes with excited squeals and squeaks. Marseille may be washed and soaped but it would be difficult to ever really imagine it as clean. On discussing this with a friend she noted that, for her, the Marseillais have confused the status of cleanliness with the merely perfumed! Nowhere is this idea more appropriate than in the city’s truly breathtaking national park, where chalky mountains covered by a green scrub dramatically plunge into the sea. The resulting fjord-like valleys and pools – where the water is impossibly transparent –are referred to as the Calanques. It is the kind of place that rewards hikers; it is best to enter and hope that you will never find your way out. It is a true paradise.
Yet, of course, it is in this park that the city’s sewage treatment plant is to be found. Not escaping the city as anus – even the Calanques are drawn into the theatre of Marseille’s plumbing. Apparently, if one goes by boat along the coast, the cloud of seagulls mark the spot where the outlet pipe discharges into the sea. If there is a personal shame of the anus, it is something altogether different to inhabit one. To rest temporarily in its soft and enveloping folds is to experience both light and dark – a kind of permissiveness that only the transience of such a place can offer.

FOAMING LIPS

Marseille would not be complete without its shellfish. Walter Benjamin committed a whole paragraph in honour of the market traders that come with their incredible assortment of some of the most ugly, gelatinous creatures you will have laid eyes on. Although no doubt diminished from Benjamin’s Marseille – mountains of shellfish and peculiar blobby-looking rock dwellers remain displayed in the harbour and outside Marseille’s celebrated seafood canteen, Toinou. Freshly plucked from the waters around the city, thousands of foaming lips peek from shells; beautiful sea urchins are displayed sliced in half, their gently orange, star-like gonads shown to all. These creatures that spend their lives clinging to rocks, filtering the water around them for sustenance, can all be found locally; they cling to rich waters around the anus. In the markets of Marseille it is clear to see how this practice has extended beyond the depths of the Mediterranean. The street life in the port city is mollusc-like. There are endless cottage industries, entrepreneurs, touts and organised begging. Truly Marseille’s jewels, they greet passers-by with their wares, requests or a simple chorus of ‘Marlborough Marlborough’.

A PHALLIC FORTRESS

Part of Marseille’s image is created by its rich literary tradition – its status as a corruptible and corrupting enclave for artists and writers. As such, the filth that often drew a bohemian crowd was also celebrated by them. Indeed, it is this filth that is, perhaps, the longest resident of this city. Genet was no stranger to Marseille, nor its sailors or policemen. I remember experiencing a strong feeling of déjà-vu on seeing the tower of the Fort Saint-Jean, which sits squat and heavy at the entrance to Marseille’s Vieux Port. The tower’s obvious phallic form is accentuated by its undeniable similarity to the phallic tower in Fassbinder’s Querelle. Although set in Brest, on an altogether different coastline and, without any kind of nuance, was complete with huge dome-like testicles rendered in stone, it is possible in the pink light of a Marseille sunset to imagine Querelle stalking what was once an old cruising area at the base of the tower of the fortress. Thankfully, however cleaned up this area is now, the architecture is still suited to use as a toilet, with certain parts of the walkway remaining incredibly pungent. In addition, despite the fresh layer of concrete and plaster, water still oozes ominously through the porous rocks under the fortress, forming little streams over the freshly paved paths. It is perhaps this history that created Marseille’s corporeal symbolic value. Its status as an enclave for sailors is undeniable and, although diminished, this creates cultures that are as engrained as the fortress itself.

Querelle of Brest (French: Querelle de Brest) was first published anonymously in 1947 and limited to 460 numbered copies. Its protagonist, Georges Querelle, is a bisexual thief, prostitute and serial killer who manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel formed the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982).

Querelle (1982) was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, shot only a few months before his death at age thirty-seven. For filmmaker Monika Treut, Querelle ‘sums up what Fassbinder expressed in many of his earlier films,’1 but it is intriguing also for intimating new and unexplored directions. It shares the common Fassbinder themes of betrayal, power relations, rivalry, ritual, and love, but its stylized set, stiff performances, and use of colour contrasts with his more naturalistic style in the 1970s. 1) Monika Treut, ‘Man to Man’, Sight & Sound 4:5 (May 1994): p. 69. Courtesy: Claire Henry

LA JOLIETTE

And it is this area, La Joliette, which has undergone the largest upheaval since the city entered into a regeneration cycle that was kick-started by its status as European Capital of Culture in 2013. I never knew the city before that point but it’s obvious to see the almost surgical lines and scars that mark where the re-surfacing, landscaping and construction has been grafted on.
Now a national museum with an architectural cube transplanted onto it, the Fort Saint-Jean recently hosted an exhibition on Genet. Focusing mostly on his political affiliations, it neglected the building’s infamous appearance in Genet’s texts. Aside from its military history, which can be found in spades both within the Mucem and in the exceptional Marseille Historical Museum, which is shamefully hidden in the basement of the Centre Bourse shopping centre, the Fortress is also a historical cruising area, a hotspot for all kinds of relations and contacts. It appears in the background of a beautifully intimate scene in Genet’s The Thief’s Journal.
After a particularly brutal arrest at the Gare St Charles, Genet is spared by Bernardini, a policeman he had always held a particular affection for. They meet again afterwards and Genet thanks Bernardini for his kindness. He then describes the locale as I would like to imagine it:
‘One evening, as we walked along the embankments of the Joliette, the solitude which suddenly sprang up about us, the proximity of Fort Saint-Jean, packed with men of the Foreign Legion, the maddening desolateness of the port (the most heart-breaking thing that could happen to me was to be with him in that place), suddenly made me extremely bold. I was lucid enough to notice that his pace slowed up as I drew near him. With trembling hand I clumsily touched his thigh; then, not knowing how to go on, I used mechanically the formula with which I approached timid queers.’
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
‘Eh? Look, mine says noon.’
He laughed, for he had a stiff hard-on.
I saw him frequently. I would walk beside him in the street, keeping in step with him. If it was broad daylight, I would place myself so that he projected his shadow on my body. This simple game filled me with joy.’

Jean Genet (1910–1986) was a prominent, controversial French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing novels, plays, poems, and essays.

The Thief’s Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France's ‘Black Prince of Letters’ here reconstructs his early adult years – time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, travelling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across the rest of Europe, always one step ahead of the authorities.

SHADOW PLAY

Genet’s description of his game is as much an endearing expression of his transgressive love for the policeman as it is a perfect description of Marseille’s unique light. Perhaps the most enduring and distinctive feature of the city is light – its burning, staring sun and almost brutally purple-blue sky. The light casts immense and pin-sharp shadows; it is a world in high contrast, of an equally staring light and darkness. Genet’s simple game represents how it is possible to imagine Marseille. With the city’s rich and sordid past, we are now in the process of playing the same game, of moving around the city from shadow to shadow in a love affair taking place in streets that even today can feel maddeningly desolate. The tower of the Fort Saint is, for want of a more delicate phrase, always at twelve o’clock.
La Joliette, where Genet was walking, would be unrecognisable to him now. It has undergone an intense form of cleansing. Notably they have managed, partially at least, to remove the layer of filth that settles in other areas. Marseille is in a moment of change – but as the Palais Longchamp is testament to – the city has always been a glorious and beautiful anus. To block the flow, to imagine it as a destination, would be to imagine a different city altogether. And having said that, the rats are still here and in Marseille even brand-new buildings, however transparent and glassy, will always continue to cast a sharp shadow on the streets below.

Un Chant d’Amour is Jean Genet’s only film: a twenty-six--minute, black-and-white, imagistic collage and fantasy of ideas. It’s startlingly beautiful, sensuous, and animated by themes – homosexuality, transgression, dominance, voyeurism – that characterize all of the mercurial artist’s work. The film presents a passionate relationship between inmates, separated from each other by the prison walls. The prisoners express their estranged desire for each other in increasingly sensual ways until the frame is filled with writhing bodies. All the while, a lone guard watches, menacing and jealous. Courtesy: Josh Jones

Palais Longchamp

SHAME

Of course, Marseille is probably more aptly described as a gateway – it was, for centuries, the beating heart of France’s extensive trading and colonial empire. It is a fortified city, an important military location. It was the headquarters of conquest, of domination and exploitation. Through Marseille, France demonstrated its colonial prowess and although now these power dynamics remain in very different and more abstract formations, France has never really gone through a period of shame or regress over its colonial past. Out of sight, out of mind, perhaps France’s collective shame is enacted in this suspicion of Marseille – of the recognition of what Marseille was used as an instrument within. My aim to describe Marseille as an anus doesn’t come from any attempt to dismiss it, but rather to recognise it as a complicated and sensual organ – a metaphorically powerful instrument, a transgressive place – one in which a certain wildness is combined with a potentially transformative desire.

8 Marseille: A Solar Anus