ancient cities

cities have lost much of their circumscribability
and visible conspicuousness. The contemporary
network metropolis is no longer a relatively clear
spatial entity with a nucleus characterized by density
and congestion. It has sprawled and merged
with its former hinterland. Suburban peripheries
have frequently come to accommodate all of the
central city’s classic functions and morphed into
unmappable, hybrid conurbations scholars now
call posturban or postsuburban. Under these circumstances,
the heroic fight of individuals against
the industrial and commercial mainstays of
modernity—a classic scenario proposed by the
older urban novel—has become irrelevant in the
eyes of many urbanized writers and readers.
Just as the Melvillean seafarer’s novel died a
slow death after the arrival of the steamboat and
nonmaritime transportation systems, the city novel,
as a distinct category addressing the totality of life
and society in the modern world, has been overtaken
by its increasingly sprawling and disseminating
subject. This dissipation of a circumscribable
urban topos—in both senses of the word—ties in
with the phenomenon that many writers today are
urban-based and have never experienced the culture
shock of country-to-city migration that usually
inspired the historic urban novel. This in turn
has made the urban environment seem more banal
than to their novelistic predecessors: It has become
the default experience. In some cases, the central
or downtown metropolis has even come to be
regarded by writers as a realm of nostalgia in contrast
to the newer, confusing forms of posturban,
cybernetic, or global chaos.
The second sociogeographic transformation
with a major impact on the writing and reading of
urban-based fiction is sociological. More than ever
before, urban lifestyles and urban locales have
been uncoupled. With the dispersal of urban functions
to suburbia and of urban images and lifestyles
through the audiovisual media, behavioral
patterns formerly deemed inseparable from big cities
(like dandyism, the formation of subcultural
groups, or interpersonal relationships based on
rationality and reserve) have spread over a much
wider part of the population. And just as the
Western city in its spatial components has come to
resist representation in traditional cartographic
terms, social networks in today’s city à la carte
have become more extended, mobile, and resistant
Urban Novel
901
to synthetic analysis. The rise in individualism and
the multiplication of lifestyles run parallel to
changes in fiction generally and urban fiction in
particular. What tends to remain in such a context
is a highly personal, often decentered perspective.
The mooring of individuals in a more collective
locale (as opposed to very specific neighborhoods)
is no longer what takes precedence in the worldviews
of fictional protagonists. This is one reason
why more recent studies of urban fiction tend to be
more culture-sociological than literary-critical.
Shifts in Representational Strategies
Transformations in the representational strategies
of cultural producers, whether at the level of narrative
media, literary aesthetics, or the social background
of text producers, have further strengthened
the aforesaid processes. The first thing to note here
is how the documentary function of literary prose
appears to have been taken over largely by the
audiovisual media and written journalism, in
which urban settings predominate. The success of
new audiovisual media is crucial to this process.
The demonstrative and immersive qualities of the
visual and acoustic senses are such that literary
descriptions cannot match them for sheer experiential
impact and immediacy.
Within the field of written descriptions of
urban environments, the revelatory documentary
role of novels has arguably also declined. In
today’s information society, the synthetic documentary
role that could still be assumed by a
nineteenth-century writer such as Dickens has
been taken over largely by academics (sociologists,
geographers, ethnographers, anthropologists, historians).
This shift in written representations of
city life is further strengthened by the blooming
postwar industry of urban magazines, which offer
their own mix of visually enhanced investigative
journalism, short stories, sketches, columns, and
semi-sociological lifestyle analyses that frequently
offer the same ingredients as the earlier writings of
novelists. The only major kind of literature to
preserve its documentary relevance about urban
environments is that of popular fiction—in particular,
crime fiction.
Simultaneously, it would appear that the ambition
of nineteenth-century realist writers to represent
the city in a totalizing manner as the embodiment of