By Kai U Cheang

The map shows several different layers. One layer shows all the places Lafala travels through and mentions—including places he remembers outside of Marseilles—in Chapters Seven and Eight of Romance in Marseille. Since most of the places are speculative, I have went by context clues found in other parts of the novel. For instance, the Tout Va Bien is a place in ‘Quayside’ and I located Lafala’s hotel somewhere at the ‘center of town’ (McKay 75). Judging by some hotel advertisements from the 1920s, there were some fancy hotels that existed in the central area of Cannebiere. However, I have elected not to map the ‘solid established banking house’ which was mentioned, since this is deliberately vague and there were too many examples to be certain. For the purpose of this analysis, which maps how financial mobility influences relationships between named characters, this place was also not too pertinent; so whilst I had some speculations on which bank it may be, I have chosen to not map it. Two lines show the routes Lafala took in the two chapters respectively. A separate layer shows ‘Places where Africa is mentioned’. A fourth layer shows hits for the word ‘money’ in the two chapters, and a fifth layer shows hits for the word ‘love’ and its variations. All the locations in the map (except for the docks) are imagined and speculative; I drew polygons to designate that those locations would have been in a general area but that it is not specific.

Introduction 

This article delves into how mapping spaces in Chapters Seven and Eight of Romance illuminate relations between space and financial mobility. It considers how the map visually categorises information, such as the appearance of the word ‘money’ in different places, making it practical to see where the term appears most and form a humanistic analysis on why this is so. Layers of the map also visually represent how Lafala experiences envisioned spaces of the future in ‘Africa’, beyond the places he currently inhabits, due to his increased financial mobility.

Financial interests dominate throughout Romance in Marseilles. The word ‘money’ occasionally appears—about two to four times—within 25 words of Key Word In Context (KWIC) searches for places such as ‘Afric*’ or ‘Bien’ throughout the novel. A Word Type AntConc search—which shows the frequency of a word in the novel—reveals that ‘money’ is the common noun with the most appearances (Fig. 1). The 117 results for ‘money’ in a KWIC search points towards a promising direction as well, but as Hoover points out in his article about using computational evidence to examine what close reading could not show, astute humanistic approaches must also be incorporated (248). Thus, it is important to consider how mapping this term contributes to an understanding of the way space creates meaning in the novel and which part of the novel to map.

‘Place’ and ‘Space’

Before this essay delves into analysis, it is helpful to define what ‘space’ entails. De Certeu’s explanation of ‘space’ is helpful: a space is the way a person—a character—practises or operates with a ‘place’ (12). In other words, ‘place’ is the geographical locations and forms which a character inhabits, but the way characters interact, inhabit, and experience a place gives it meaning and makes it a ‘space’. In Romance, characters experience space differently because of their status. For instance, the Tout Va Bien is a subversive space for St. Dominique to espouse revolutionary anti-Capitalist, communist ideas. It is also a space where capital is circulated because sex workers like Aslima also seek business there. However, for Lafala and his friends, it is a space for pleasure.

Because Lafala experiences the biggest change in financial status, this article focuses on mapping how this change affects his self-conceptualisation and relationships in several spaces. It will focus specifically on the spaces Lafala envisions or inhabits in Chapters Seven and Eight—the pivotal point where he re-experiences Marseilles as a wealthier man than he was. Thus, this map tracks the places where ‘money’ is mentioned on one layer, the mention of ‘love’ and its variations on another, the mentions of ‘Africa’ on a separate layer, and finally, Lafala’s routes and spaces in Chapters Seven and Eight the way he experiences them, with an aim of understanding how ‘money’ and ‘love’ appears in them. The rationale for mapping out the spaces this way is inspired by Bodenhamer’s contention that ‘each layer [of a GIS Map could] represent a memory anchored in time and space…each stack of layers would contain the unique view over time, the dynamic memory, of an individual…’ (104). Bodenhamer is arguing for the historical reconstructions of a place, but this is also helpful for mapping out the ambiguities of a narrative.

Mapping ‘money’, ‘love’ and ‘Africa’

The map firstly acts as a way of categorising and sorting the spreadsheet data. Through mapping ‘money’, it becomes apparent that the term appears much more frequently in the intimate space of the hotel Lafala stays at compared to places where ‘money’ functions more conspicuously, such as the unnamed ‘banking house’ or the Tout Va Bien—which is a space of business. Aslima’s initial approach to Lafala is described with sterile, business-like diction; she ‘challenge[s] La Fleur’ [her business rival] to ‘stage a comeback’ and surgically ‘size[s] up the situation’ (McKay 32). Strangely, it is at the private space of the hotel instead of the more public spaces,  where ‘money’ is discussed in higher frequency and more candidly with Aslima. Here the word ‘love’ and its variation also show up close to the word ‘money’; Lafala questions if he could ‘love’ Aslima the same way as her pimp, Titin (McKay 40). Her rejection of Lafala’s money also occurs, despite Lafala’s view that Aslima has ‘got to love to make money’ for her ‘living’ (McKay 41). It is within these vulnerable spaces that ‘money’ and ‘love’ is most often mentioned as the characters are forced to confront the exterior apparatus—‘money’—which permeates into their lives and restricts the choices they make. Stephanie J. Brown suggests that McKay denies the characters of Romance too much interiority, instead, he ‘[dramatises] the specific ways in which surveillant environments [referring partially to global, corporate, Capitalist surveillance caused by Lafala’s newfound money] require that the experience of self be reduced to a reckoning with surface’ (95). The ‘surface’ here is the way ‘money’ affects their lives. Even as they dream of returning to ‘Africa’ and Lafala proposes to Aslima—half seriously and half in jest—it is ambiguous how truthful or achievable such ideals are, because the characters’ understanding of this future envisioned space and their relationship are tainted by ‘money’. Although it is through close reading that ‘money’ becomes understood and contextualised in Chapter Seven and Eight, it is also through the mapping of ‘money’ that its conspicuousness in intimate spaces over public spaces becomes apparent. Thus, it is through the symbiotic tools of computational analysis and humanistic analysis that this argument could be drawn.

The map also visually represents data and shows how characters could, in their minds, be displaced into a different space even though they are geographically in one place. A ‘space’ that is constantly mentioned in relation to ‘money’ is ‘Africa’. In the map, a separate layer shows all the instances where ‘Africa’ is mentioned. Through Lafala’s acquisition of money, he envisions himself comfortably returning to ‘Africa’ and convinces Aslima to entertain his idea (McKay 41). But this idealistic vision in the private space is put to question in the public space of the Tout Va Bien by his friend, who tells him ‘[w]hite man don’t like black man with brains nor money near him in jungleland’ (McKay 35). Nevertheless, a financially emboldened Lafala insists: ‘I was born there and am going right back with a little civilization in my pocket’ (McKay 35). It is Lafala’s increased financial status that allows him to reach into this far, future, envisioned ‘space’, which was inaccessible to him before—at least, not as a space for settling with his lover. In his essay that historicises the works of McKay, Smethurst argues that Romance is a ‘cautionary tale rather than a romance of liberation’ about a protagonist who had ‘traded his legs, his means of mobility…for money’ (361). But ironically—and tragically—Lafala’s newfound ‘money’ is the key means by which he could envision himself moving back to the space of ‘Africa’ comfortably and convince Aslima to entertain his idea (McKay 41). Much like a tragic hero forced through his journey by the currents of fate, it is the currents of capital that enables Lafala to dream of returning to Africa—it is through examining the way Lafala conceptualises the space of ‘Africa’ that the tragic tone of the novel becomes apparent; and it is also through visually representing these spaces and concepts, stacked on top of each other as layers, that such relations becomes apparent.

In conclusion, through mapping out spaces where ‘money’ appears, it becomes apparent that the search term appeared in private spaces more than public spaces. This gives insight into how the characters are forced to confront the way ‘money’ taints their relationship and encroaches into their interiority, as symbolised by their vulnerability in the intimate, private space. Then, it shows how visual representation on the map draws out the relation of ‘money’ to another space, ‘Africa’. Despite its insidious nature, ‘money’ enables Lafala to become financially mobile and envision comfortably moving to another space, thus, highlighting the tragic trajectory of Lafala’s newfound financial mobility. Ultimately, it uses computational analysis and humanistic analysis to highlight the relations between space, ‘money’, ‘love’ and ‘Africa’. Through combining computational analysis made practical by sorting AntConc data into a map—which in turn made word patterns more noticeable—along with careful humanistic approaches such as close reading and reference to the critical discourse, this piece illuminates how increased financial mobility affected Lafala’s self-conceptualisation and relationships through the framework of spatial studies.

Fig 1: A ‘Word List’ search on AntConc, which ranks the words that appear in Romance in Marseille [italicise] by frequency, shows that ‘money’ is the most frequently mentioned common noun in the novel.

Work Cited

Brown, Stephanie J. ‘Marseille Exposed: Under Surveillance in Claude McKay’s Banjo and Romance in Marseilles.’ English Language Notes, vol. 59, no. 1, 2021, pp. 93–108, Marseille Exposed | English Language Notes | Duke University Press (dukeupress.edu). Accessed 07/12/2023.

Bodenhamer, David J. ‘Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS.’ International Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 97–110, https://doi.org/10.3366/E1753854808000207. Accessed 07/12/2023.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 2011.

Hoover, David L. ‘Argument, Evidence, and the Limits of Digital Literary Studies.’ Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 230–50. University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 230-250, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.23. Accessed 07/12/2023.

McKay, Claude. Romance in Marseille. Penguin Classics, 2020.

Smedhurst, James. “The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century.” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 2, 2009, pp. 355-367, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20492307. Accessed 07/12/2023.

Sources used for map:

Posters advertising hotels in the 1920s, via Wikimedia Commons:

Unknown Author. Guides Diamant : Marseille, Aix et environs, éditions Hachette, 1925. File:Réclame Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix à Marseille-1925.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

Unknown Author. Guides Diamant : Marseille, Aix et environs, éditions Hachette, 1925.
[[File:Réclames Spendid-Hotel & Grand Hôtel de Provence à Marseille-1925.jpg|Réclames_Spendid-Hotel_&_Grand_Hôtel_de_Provence_à_Marseille-1925]]

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