Unreal City to City of Referents: Urban Space in Contemporary London Novels

Abstract

Unreal City to City of ReferentsUrban Space in Contemporary London Novels Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga (bio) The notion of the "Unreal City" has reigned supreme in the West's twentieth-century urban imaginary, ever since the modernist avant-garde bade farewell to a view of the city as an "aggregate of interacting social parts" that could "be accommodated to a stable and unified artistic viewpoint," and transformed it into a preferred symbol of the contingent nature of modern experience (Eliot 60; Timms 4). For modernists, urban entropy was an effect of the dynamic acceleration of technological development and its effect on human life and consciousness. The materially dominant environment of the "real" city, as Malcolm Bradbury puts it, was substituted with the "unreal" city of "unresolved and plural impression," leaving one with the subjective, the spectral, and the uncanny (99). The city eluded representation as impressions could not do justice to the complexity of the modern metropolis. Though, as Raymond Williams suggests, high modernist explorations of the city might not have been as innovative as is generally thought, the symbolic power of the image of the fragmented, isolating urban spaces with haunted, silent crowds persisted for generations (15–19; Long 145). Subsequently, the postmodern shift from an epistemological dominant to an ontological one, "from problems of knowing to problems of modes of being," gave the term "unreal city" a wholly new meaning (McHale 10). As the strategy of wrenching signifiers free from signifieds spread onto [End Page 305] new areas of discourse, the "postmetropolis" (Soja) found itself at the center of postmodern crisis of representation. At the end of the twentieth century, not just art and philosophy but also urban studies and cultural geography faced the reality of increased blurriness between real and simulated spatialities. The contemporary city, argues Edward W. Soja following Iain Chambers, "seems to be increasingly unmoored from its spatial specificity, from the city as a fixed point of collective reference, memory, and identity" (150). The "industrial capitalist city, with its decidedly fixed referents and established urban epistemologies" has been supplanted by the cybercity, the city of flows, impossible to map out and incapable of supporting identity (150). As Soja explains, in the "Information Age, with its inveigling webs of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, netscapes, cyberspatial communications, and 'digital communities,' the hard materialities of cityspace seem to evaporate as the whole world (and more) is drawn into every city's symbolic zone" (151). Postmodern films and urban novels have gradually made themselves at home in the "consensual hallucination" of the matrix (Gibson 51). Here the city is often portrayed as volatile, unstable, and indeterminate. Whether it is Jeanette Winterson's "living city" of Venice (113), Salman Rushdie's "metamorphosed" London (331) or Paul Auster's "city of glass," the contemporary cityscape is envisaged as "constantly fluctuating, constantly under negotiation, always decentralised and structured by altering simulations" (Middleton and Woods 307). The city functions as a "crisis-object" destabilizing "our certainty about 'the real'" (Shields 227). As Rushdie writes of Gibreel's experience of London in The Satanic Verses: The city's streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents. London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future. (330–31) Most importantly, however, the city remains ineffable; it eludes representation. As material and represented spaces merge into one another, shifting [End Page 306] urban realities become the site of shifting signification. The city of places gives way to the "city of signs," signs in a state of crisis. In postmodern fiction, Wolfreys argues, "[r]epresentation is only available as the ruins of representation" (182) and writers "can only bear witness to that which cannot be represented and admit its inadequacy" (11). This paper examines three contemporary London novels that traverse the urban simulacrum in search of a way out. Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and Iain Sinclair's Downriver can be read as...