ancient cities

902 Urban Novel
modernity has both waned and been displaced. We
can observe a shift in the course of the twentieth
century toward a more selective representation of
urban culture. Thus, the novels of Hanif Kureishi,
Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, and Sarah Schulman—
the main literary case studies in Brooker’s Modernity
and Metropolis—all suggest that local communities
and restricted areas are the material contemporary
writers most like to work with. In the works of
Zola, Dreiser, Joyce, Döblin, or Dos Passos, by contrast,
would-be heroic attempts were still made to
describe the city as a historic totality.
The antitotalizing tendency is also in evidence
when we scan contemporary fiction set in non-
Western cities. Many Asian, Latin American, and
African novels confirm how the heydays of the
modernist urban novel are over. Such works, too,
frequently focus on everyday social realities in the
city and the resulting cultural identities of urbanites.
In so doing, moreover, they often stage an
interesting tension between the sense of the city
imported from the West and more local traditions.
Urban representations in the works of Yukio
Mishima, Kazuo Ishiguro, and especially Yoshikichi
Furui combine Western liberal sentiments about
the city with themes almost exclusively connected
to Japanese culture. In recent Chinese literature,
the confrontation often assumes the guise of a
skeptical problematization or even downright condemnation
of urban living conditions. And in contemporary
Hispanic American fiction, the city
regularly appears as a derailing, overpopulated,
violent environment that leaves its characters
struggling with the forces of globalization.
Apart from the changing treatment of setting and
characters, some further aesthetic transformations
seem to have killed off the monolithic urban novel.
A lot of mainstream Western novels depict today’s
urban world as, above all, a textual realm of signs,
a world dominated by the simulacra of information
and communication technologies and by objects of
conspicuous consumption. Such texts suggest that,
to many writers, the distinctive characteristic of city
life is no longer its modernity but its postmodernity.
Typically, postmodern authors concentrate on the
artificial and fabricated quality of their personal
confrontations with the social world. Their city is
first and foremost an abstract, semiotic world, not
the empirical city as such appears to be the challenge
for the average postmodern author, but the
fictional constructs which we use in trying to comprehend
the urban world of simulacra and the
mediatized global village arising from our urban
condition.
In many ways, the ideological soil of the classic
urban novel appears to have dried up since the interbellum.
While realism in its documentary and historiographic
modes was the dominant literary trend
between 1850 and 1930, it has become less hegemonic
since the success of the great modernist writers.
Western postwar fiction is no longer principally
interested in the opposition between utopian and
dystopian perspectives on the modern industrial city
but rather in issues like the hyperreality of our postmodern
condition, the representation of a decentered
subjectivity, and various forms of
epistemological and linguistic skepticism.
Much of the skepticism toward universalizing
scenarios has to do with the way in which the literary
field has become more democratically representative
as a result of social emancipation and
education processes. For writers and readers alike,
membership in specific social groups has come to
seem more important for their self-identification
than the coincidental metropolitan locale in which
life stories happen to be set. The White middleclass
heterosexual male author whose totalizing
vantage point tended to monopolize earlier urban
fiction has been effectively contested. Both writers
and readers have become more aware that perspectives
on metropolitan life are always gendered and
inflected by class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality,
and country of origin. This enhanced sensitivity
has produced a greater variety of urban narratives,
sometimes explicitly tailored to different “niches”
in the market. It is also responsible for the more
selective, politically self-conscious approach taken
to fictional representations of the contemporary
city by scholars like John Clement Ball and Carlo
Rotella, or for retrospective corrections on our
understanding of modernist urban fiction in the
studies of Barta, Donald, Highmore, and Wirth-
Nesher. To such critics (a majority today), the
encompassing intellectual and literary project that
was out to condense modernity in the form of the
city has come to seem suspiciously reductive and
should be supplanted by more localized, theorized,
and political forms of knowledge.
Bart Eeckhout and Bart Keunen