English
Maybe the only detail that is missing in Joyce Ulysses novel a subway system. The Irish writer wrote a book after the massacre of World War I which didn’t praise heroism of war but describes much more the frustrations of the modern hero. After the horror of the war it seems impossible to glorify heroism of the war, but much more to portrait the new hero of the city.
As Dublin didn’t have a subway, Joyce placed the action parallel to Odyssey’s visit to the Hades in the cemetery, but we cannot stop imagining how much proper would it have been if the action would have happened in the underground, real neuralgic centre of modern big cities that puts us in direct touch with the phantom reality at the same time that serves as an adequate illustration of the dark labyrinth of the human unconscious.
Many artists and writers were fascinated by the subway, real black hole of urban cosmos, as a group of dimensions governed by a different time and space, easily accessible and highly elastic, it has attracted an important part of the creators of the 20th century, interested somehow by its metaphors. Despite Joyce’s omission, both literature and cinema (Jarry, Queneau, Córtazar, Malle, Godard, Besson, Carrax…) have been able to include sometimes this world underneath our feet which almost seems like a parallel universe in which you can see ghosts.
After having witnessed the indescribable horrors of the Great War, it was no other choice than rejecting to show the myth of the ancient military heroism and its conquest codes, which are male chauvinist and authoritarian and displace the adventure territory of the battlefield or beaches where ships camped to the urban space of the modern cities, place where new era’s women and men developed their quotidian odyssey.
Would this happen to you when you take Line 1 in Madrid, do not be scared because this line passes through the ancient Chamberi station (Plaza de Chamberi, between underground stops Iglesia and Bilbao) which was closed down 44 years ago and was reopened recently after elaborate renovations.
Hardly ever is this double condition of travelling to the hell and acceding to phantom reality maps felt as intensely as when in winter, with the face stuck to the carriage windows as we made when we were children, we succeed to see the spectrum of a station which was abandoned long ago. In these occasions, it is not strange if you think you have seen different figures in the phantom platform.
Paul Oilzum
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