Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce by Hye-Joon Yoon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce by Hye-Joon Yoon Younghee Kho (bio) METROPOLIS AND EXPERIENCE: DEFOE, DICKENS, JOYCE, by Hye-Joon Yoon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. vii + 345 pp. $63.55. James Joyce has been a favorite staple of scholars drawn to write on the subject of city and urban experience. A constant stream of research has been conducted on Joyce and the city; in this decade [End Page 196] alone, two other monographs on the subject have been published.1 Among them, Hye-Joon Yoon's book certainly attracts attention since its scope extends beyond that of most other works in the area and far beyond the particular period of modernism or its iconic writer Joyce. As the title itself indicates, Metropolis and Experience covers three dissimilar authors from three disparate ages: Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, and Joyce. What enables these "odd bedfellows" to settle in the same place is their urban experience: as Yoon argues, "the metropolitan condition of life … calls for a corresponding synthetic approach crossing the period boundaries set up by faculty meetings" (1, 3). "[T]he challenges of modernity as embodied in an urbanized world," he continues, "can and should be read in conjunction, in concert, for the metropolitan experiences they articulate ignore academic border control" (3). Accustomed as academics are to such border control, his point is a somewhat awkward one, but the power of his book lies precisely in his comfortable treatment of the chosen authors on the uncomfortable ground we tread. When thoroughly experienced, his book demonstrates why we should listen to his contention; those "odd bedfellows" each peacefully occupy an individual position, with metropolitan experiences emanating both from the content and form of their writing. This surprising accommodation is guaranteed by Yoon's skillful management, for he chose the authors because, "rather than simply 'depicting' or 'representing' urban life, they have invented distinctive modes of 'experiencing' the city" (5). In order to articulate and elaborate such distinctive modes, Yoon adopts the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis as analytical tools. Both Erfahrung and Erlebnis are terms to describe experience, but they have certain meanings that the English word "experience," with its "scientific and empiricist bias," does not convey (8). Roughly speaking, experience through which new knowledge or wisdom is gained over a certain period of time may be called Erfahrung. Erlebnis, on the other hand, "connotes a 'lived (erlebt) moment,' a distinctively memorable incident, typically accompanying a sensory, psychological, or physiological shock" (13). Erlebnis "bears on the subject's attitude and sentiments with no promise or possibility of their articulation into a 'structural unity' or 'inner relations'" (16). As distinct as these terms are in their meanings, Yoon also stresses the dialectic relationship between them: "Erlebnis and Erfahrung are mutually complementary as well as contrastive in the metropolitan novel. Without one the other cannot stand. Without the desire to attain a level of Erfahrung the very act of narration cannot be continued[;] without the constant encounter of Erlebnis the novelist has nothing to write about" (13–14). Indeed, the dialectic of Erfahrung and Erlebnis is the point to which Yoon returns over and over again in the [End Page 197] discussion of each novelist and his texts. While the presence of the Erfahrung-Erlebnis dialectic puts Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce under the same roof, the particulars nevertheless critically differentiate them from one another. Samuel Pepys's diaries create a textual space similar to one in Defoe's novels within which his first-person narrators colorfully convey their "sensory, physical, psychological Erlebnis," each from a snug private sphere, guarded by numerical and statistical language, language that often prevents them from imparting Erfahrung (296).2 Instead of merely describing Erlebnis, Dickens attempts to develop those ephemeral experiences into meaningful truths of life; however, the journalistic nature of his novels, written by one of the most popular authors who kept a journal himself, increasingly fails at this task. "Erlebnis and Erfahrung compete with each other" without resolution in Dickens's novels, Yoon observes, especially in the later works such as Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, or Little Dorrit (17).3 In Joyce's metropolitan novel, Ulysses, we see...